Should medical doctors be worried now?

I have been asked by quite a few friends what is the best way to protect ourselves for long term care. I have never recommended to have a LTC insurance as it will mostly be wasted (see my blog here on this topic). In my mind, a well-designed whole life insurance is a better alternative that can also take care of the LTC needs (see here for more details). Apart from that, I also think our generation will have a good chance to enjoy AI based robots who can take good care of us when we are really old. But this is more on the physical side. Now with the red hot generative AI, ChatGPT, hitting the world, it seems we will very soon see well qualified AI doctors who can accurately diagnose and treat patients. See the real test story below. As a physician, I'm really impressed by the ChatGPT differential diagnoses. Just one personal opinion on the order of the possible diagnoses. I'd think this patient could more likely have coronary  artery disease than hypertension. Not sure if my doctor friends would agree with me.

My real question is: with such a powerful AI available, won't we quickly and soon enter an era when most people don't need to see a real human doctor but just an AI doctor? If so, should the young practicing medical doctors be worried about their futures? I do see the career crisis for them, unfortunately!😨

*********************************************************

And it turns out ChatGPT is also a medical whiz. After it passed the USMLE, I suggested that the AI could be used to help doctors make accurate diagnoses in the future.

Well, it turns out the future is already here. A small early stage company out of San Francisco just launched a feature that applies generative AI to the medical field.

The company is called Glass Health. I asked my team to try out its platform. Turns out it's quite impressive.

To test it out, we entered a hypothetical situation: 54-year old male presenting with chest pain, headaches, body mass index of 25, otherwise healthy. Then we pressed the "Generate DDx" button. DDX stands for "differential diagnosis."

It took the AI a few seconds to make its diagnosis… but it's quite thorough. Here's a look:

Source: Glass Health

After reading through the diagnosis, we clicked the "Generate Clinical Plan" button. And here's what the AI suggested:

As we can see, the AI suggests doing an EKG, a chest x-ray, a CT angiogram, and possibly even blood work. It also suggests a few prescriptions that could help the patient, starting with Aspirin.

What a practical tool. Most incredible is how quickly it produced useful and actionable information.

And here's the best part – generative AIs can incorporate the entire body of research in every area of medicine into their diagnoses. No single physician could possibly do that.

What's more, these AIs can be updated every day. That way they will always incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research into their suggestions.