When a simple medical test flagged that I had a potential heart issue, I fed the report into AI to get immediate answers, instead of waiting to hear from my doctor.
AI explained my diagnosis, what the possible outcomes were and the medications available for treatment. Sounds helpful, doesn’t it?
But it also said the condition causes sudden death and I would require immediate open heart surgery. Forget the diagnosis, that alone almost gave me a heart attack.
Fortunately, AI was a little overzealous. Though it gave me some accurate information, it wasn’t all correct. In fact, my condition was completely controllable with a simple prescription.
According to a KFF Tracking Poll, 1 in 3 adults have used AI in the last year for health information and advice, and 2 out of 3 of those polled said they use AI to find out more about their health concerns before seeing a clinician. With AI becoming more and more advanced, it almost seems like chat bots will replace clinicians one day. Even some clinicians are worried that they’ll eventually become obsolete.
The good news is that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. “For the foreseeable future, there’s so much of what healthcare professionals do that requires judgment,” said Robert Wachter, M.D., chair of the Department of Medicine at University of California at San Francisco, and author of A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.
We looked into the research to find out exactly what AI can and cannot do, what the future looks like, and why we’ll always need humans when it comes to healthcare.
