AI doctors are coming....

 A while a ago I posted this blog:

Should medical doctors be worried now?

 Of course not everyone would agree with me. Many people believe it is not a real threat at all in the foreseeable future. But I do believe the pace of evolution of a new technology nowadays can move very fast, much quicker than we can imagine! This is especially true about something revolutionary like AI technology. While I also don't believe the AI doctors, when they come, will simply replace the existing physicians, it can be a real threat to those who are entering the medical field. Let's keep our mind open and watch what is coming....

 

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Generative AI versus human doctors…

A team of researchers from the University of California San Diego and Johns Hopkins University just published a study that provides an interesting lens on the future use of AI in healthcare.

The research took an early look at the employment of generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. Researchers used an online forum and allowed chatbots to answer medical-related questions from patients. Then they gathered 195 exchanges. The results may surprise us…

The study analyzed the difference between the responses from human physicians compared to exchanges with medically trained AIs. I love it. There’s a lot we can learn from studies like this about the future of AI in healthcare.

Check this out:

It turns out that the humans scoring these responses preferred the interactions from the AI rather than the human doctors 78.6% of the time. And as we can see in the graph above, the quality of responses from the AI turned out to be about 3.6 times better than the responses they got from the physicians.

What’s more, the human respondents felt that the AIs were 9.8 times more empathetic. The panelists reviewing the responses were impressed that each response from the chatbot was personalized and went beyond “boilerplate answers.”

In one example, an online patient asked about what happens if they swallowed a toothpick. The response from the human doctor was 58 words in total, while the chatbot answered with 191 words.

To me, this is very encouraging research. And it’s also interesting that humans felt they had a better overall experience speaking with an AI rather than a physician. It’s even more ironic that the AI (software) demonstrated far better empathy than humans did.

This is huge. And what’s exciting to me about the use of a medically trained AI is that the whole world will benefit. The AIs can work 24/7, 365 days a year. They don’t need to eat, drink, or sleep. They’re always available, and they never get tired or complain.

But even more than that, we could train a single AI on the entire body of medical knowledge available to us. That includes all the different specialties in medicine. It goes without saying that this would be an impossible task for any human doctor.

Using AI in this way will go a long way toward alleviating the shortage of physicians around the world, especially in developing countries. That shortage is further amplified when it comes to specialists.

Imagine if we had a single AI that could diagnose, prescribe, and interact with patients about any medical matter. And the AI could do so at a very low cost.

This technology could completely democratize access to world-class healthcare. Anyone on Earth with access to a computer or smartphone could get an appointment with an AI instantly. Even diagnostic data could be provided to the AI such as results from blood tests or imaging.