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By the time AI changes are appreciable, the healthcare industry will have pivoted to give experienced physicians a more critical role.
It is doubtful that artificial intelligence (AI) will replace physicians anytime soon. Despite the high marks scored by ChatGPT in the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) tests and changes in various medical domains due to AI, healthcare professionals’ jobs are safe. Even the belief that AI has the potential to be “better” than doctors and nurses is difficult to prove and opens the industry to liability issues. By the time AI changes are appreciable, the healthcare industry will have pivoted to give experienced physicians a more critical role.
AI & Physician Safeguards
AI in the healthcare industry will have to overcome many barriers to prove it is good enough to take away any part of a physician’s decision-making. In a recent interview with Andrew Beam, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he acknowledged, “AI also poses serious challenges when used in medicine. For instance, AI may be able to help increase access to medical advice in lower- and middle-income countries, but there could be potential for harm if the interventions aren’t rigorously validated before they are deployed in those populations.”
Without the approval of regulatory organizations governing the industry (such as the Food and Drug Administration), it is illegal to allow AI to diagnose patients. In addition, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other privacy issues surrounding the industry and accessing data require intense scrutiny of any new technology before it is allowed to enter mainstream medicine. As an August 2023 report in The Lancet noted, “AI performs best at well-defined tasks and when models can easily augment rather than replace human judgment.”
Timing & Talent
Despite the need for caution, there is a push to integrate AI into the healthcare field, partly due to the cost of AI training becoming more affordable. There is more investment in technology that allows for more patient information to be available online (e.g., via patient portals) and digitized records that accept specific diagnostic codes. More information can be fed into data mining algorithms, creating both streamlined and expedited outcomes for patients and providers.
There must be a gold standard for AI training in the field, and that gold standard is the physicians. That bar is much lower in other industries. For example, suppose Google decides to train AI to identify dogs. In that case, it can hire untrained workers with no formal qualifications to look at photos, differentiate dogs from other animals, and feed the data into the algorithm. When it comes to making diagnoses, reviewing X-rays, and assessing specific parts of the human body, however, only physicians and other highly trained clinical professionals who have undergone years of formal training, supervision, and licensing from the government are qualified to diagnose or assist in diagnosing patients.
Embracing the Future
In the future, physicians, healthcare providers, and medical vendors may take more of a supervisory role as AI becomes further integrated into the industry. The upside is that AI will reduce the paperwork these workers normally undertake as part of their daily routines, such as patient tracking. Several companies already use AI, including the health tech startup Regard in Los Angeles, CA, whose system automatically updates patient information and generates clinical notes. AI has already demonstrated it can assist in diagnosing illnesses by extrapolating data from medical devices such as heart monitors and Apple watches and then interpreting that data. AI scans of X-rays spot the early onset of certain illnesses and facilitate the development of new drugs, including COVID-19 vaccines. AI also could potentially have the ability to provide medical assistance to people who live in sparsely populated, rural, or remote areas with limited healthcare coverage or are serviced only by nurses or nurse practitioners.
AI in the healthcare industry has a long way to go before it is trusted with unsupervised patient care. Nonetheless, doctors and policymakers can use AI to improve the patient care process, making mundane and repetitive tasks much easier. AI can assist medical professionals in everything from research and long-term planning to new treatments and protocols if the industry is willing to embrace AI with the requisite guardrails in place.
