Generative AI apps such as ChatGPT are no longer simply about helping you with emails or lines of code today, no they are more than that for example they are increasingly being used in medicine. Medical clinics and hospitals are experimenting with them to compose patient messages, summarize medical reports, and even assist doctors in making diagnostic recommendations (Miliard, 2023). This new insights represents a new stage. Instead of AI being used to automate outlying business functions, it can be used on more critical areas where a human life is at stake.
The potential advantage of this is clear. Doctors and nurses now spend hours dictating reports, filling out forms, and performing administrative work that takes time away from direct patient care. If repetitive documentation was something AI could accomplish all the time, physicians would then have more time to focus on the human side of medicine listening to patients, making difficult decisions, and performing procedures. Moreover, AI can scan medical data in seconds, detecting correlations and patterns that may be invisible to even the most experienced physicians (Jiang et al., 2017). Especially in the fields off radiology, dermatology, or genomics, the use of AI could lead to faster diagnoses and potentially better outcomes for the patients.
But risks are a real concern. An AI built on partial or prejudiced data could offer incorrect diagnoses, which could endanger some patient lives. Ethical questions come up as well: should patients be told if their discharge note or treatment plan was partly created by a computer program? And what if it goes wrong? Who is accountable the doctor, the hospital, or the tech company? Legal and accountability frameworks for AI in medicine are needed, Gerke, Minssen, and Cohen (2020) argue this and liability finds itself in a troubling gray area.
For these reasons, healthcare AI needs to be accorded with respect and in my opinion as an supportive tool at the moment and not a substitute for professional judgment. The function of the AI needs to be clarified and the responsibility of the patients should still be by the competent professionals
The question is are we ready to accept a medical report or treatment plan if you know this has been prepared partly by AI, I know I need some more clarification and prove before I can accept this.
Gerke, S., Minssen, T., & Cohen, G. (2020). Ethical and legal challenges of artificial intelligence–driven healthcare. Nature Medicine, 26(9), 1327–1334. Ethical and legal challenges of artificial intelligence-driven healthcare – ScienceDirect
Jiang, F., Jiang, Y., Zhi, H., Dong, Y., Li, H., Ma, S., … & Wang, Y. (2017). Artificial intelligence in healthcare: Past, present and future. Stroke and Vascular Neurology, 2(4), 230–243. Artificial intelligence in healthcare: past, present and future – PMC
Miliard, M. (2023, March 17). Hospitals test ChatGPT for patient communication and medical records. Healthcare IT News. https://www.healthcareitnews.com
