The healthcare landscape is changing more quickly than ever before. Lately the experts have turned their attention to the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine. AI has the potential to make revolutionary improvements to what doctors can accomplish in healthcare. There are fears that it will supplant human doctors. David Dranove, Bill Gates, and Jesse Ehrenfeld are leaders in this space. At the same time, they offer critical implications for the convoluted relationship between AI and medical practitioners.
Yet in a recent survey by Pew Research just this year, 60% of Americans said they would be worried if an AI were to replace their human doctor. Yet, this gut feeling betrays a deeper fear about what AI means for personal medical treatment. Frost & Sullivan Experts have stressed that AI will play an even bigger role in future diagnostics and treatments. Yet, they maintain that human touch and compassion are still essential to good healthcare.
We know technological advancements are changing all the time. Innovative tools such as Google’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) give us a glimpse of a future where AI enhances human clinicians—not replaces them. This regulatory development comes as no surprise to industry watchers and experts who have been forecasting a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.
The Role of Human Skills in an AI-Driven Future
David Dranove, a leading light of the discipline of healthcare economics, puts a premium on interpersonal skills as an indictment against medicine. He asserts that unlike humans, machines don’t have a lived experience in the world—a critical element in explaining and fulfilling patients’ needs.
“You had better have strong people skills,” – David Dranove, PhD
While Dranove agrees with claims that AI can radically improve diagnostic processes, he argues human judgment is indispensable. He states, “If all you can bring to your patients is book learning — knowing what tests to order and what protocols to implement based on objective data — without the ability to make subjective decisions based on differences you perceive from one patient to another, then you might as well give way to the computer.”
This point of view shows commitment to a very clear faith. AI has the potential to minimize many auxiliary tasks in healthcare, but it will never take the place of a physician. Rather, clinicians will have to use their interpersonal skills in a whole new way to work side by side with these AI-enabled technologies.
AI’s Potential and Limitations
Bill Gates predicts that within the next decade, AI will provide significant medical advice, marking a substantial shift in how patients access healthcare information. This forecast is consistent with findings from London’s Institute of Cancer Research. For example, they developed a prototype test utilizing AI in order to find the most effective drug combinations for cancer patients spend less than 48 hours.
Despite these advancements, skepticism persists. Yet the same Pew survey found that most Americans would be deeply unsettled if their healthcare provider used it extensively. This sentiment is part of a larger issue regarding misinformation and the fact that AI-generated medical advice may not always be accurate.
In this new episode, Mike Schaekermann, a research scientist at Google Health, dives deep on why it’s important for us to make medical AI factually accurate. He notes, “Ensuring factual accuracy and mitigating misinformation are critical research priorities for medical AI.” Perhaps most importantly, this underscores the need for strong oversight as AI tools are deployed more widely into clinical workflows.
The Future Landscape of Healthcare Professionals
AI technology is moving quickly. Experts such as physician Jesse Ehrenfeld don’t think that AI will ever replace physicians but rather will change the nature of the work that they do. Ehrenfeld argues that “AI is not going to replace doctors,” adding that “doctors using AI will replace doctors who aren’t using AI.” This demarcation makes it all the more important for today’s healthcare professionals to adopt the changes that new technology brings to stay relevant in a changing industry.
Well, David D’Adderio feels the same way. He envisions that three to four decades from now, people will routinely turn to AI tools for medical questions, much like they now use search engines such as Google. In his experience, he has found it very difficult to picture a situation where AI takes over all of a clinician’s duties beyond the basics.
Nigam Shah shares valuable strategies for maximizing the value of human-AI collaboration. He suggests that “we need to ask the question: What are optimal human-AI teaming setups? Maybe AI does the screening to reduce human labor.” This view drives us to continually and more closely fold AI into the day-to-day workflow with clinicians. Equally, it proves the irreplaceable value of human judgment.
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