In the latest episode, “Dr. Saini’s Office Hours,” Lown Institute Director Vikas Saini answers the question, “What are the promises and risks of AI in healthcare?”
“What does AI mean for the art of healing? It’s an interesting question, but the short answer is that AI can be liberating.”
Dr. Vikas Saini
Welcome to Dr. Saini’s office hours. I am Vikas Saini, Director of Rown Research Institute. In this series, we answer questions about the health care system, one at a time, as honestly as possible. Question of the week: What are the opportunities and dangers of AI in healthcare?
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Q1: How can AI help healthcare?
One of the areas where I think AI might be useful in general is because a lot of human intelligence is pattern recognition, and a lot of diagnostic insight is pattern recognition (but not all), some of that has to do with how we look more systematically at what we know the probabilities, and what AI does is allow us to operate at a higher level in terms of things like diagnostic prompts that a lot of people haven’t thought of. If something goes wrong, like if you get a new disease or a new virus, could that happen? A new virus? That’s an area where you can really go wrong. So I think we need to be careful about that as well.
Q2: What does AI mean for the healing arts?
What does AI mean for the healing arts? What an interesting question. Simply put, I think it means that it may be liberating. When a doctor is seeing a patient, especially if it’s a new patient or a new condition and they’re trying to solve it, the doctor goes to work. There’s a lot to cover and a lot of things you don’t know. You need to check the literature. You have to do this, you have to do that. Still, it’s tough. Similarly, finding treatment options and treatment plans takes time. I think patients’ biggest complaint is that they don’t have enough time. And the reality is, and this is one of the paradoxes of medicine, that you as a clinician are not more efficient with less time, but more efficient with more time. Because the more comprehensively you understand the situation, the easier it will be to find through shots that actually solve multiple things at once. But with the introduction of AI, the AI of the future, not the AI of today, will be able to make it easy, seamless and painless, freeing up space for being together, which is an important part of the healing process.
Now let’s consider what will happen in the future. And since I’m a doctor, I like to think about, “What is the role of a doctor in that world?” And I actually think it can be incredibly freeing. This doesn’t just mean being free from the burden of coding, billing, and commerce. I’m really talking about being freed from the anxiety of forgetting to think about a particular diagnosis, or even the understanding that you have to spend a lot of time trying to figure this out, in that you can actually be face-to-face with the patient instead. In fact, having relevant conversations with your patients will make the transfer of information from them to you and from you to them faster and more automatic, allowing both parties to explore the meaning of that information and explore its emotional leanings. And I maintain that one of the most noble missions of a doctor is to support patients in their fight against illness.
Q3: Will AI reduce the number of specialists?
I don’t think we’re even close to a situation where AI reduces the number of experts. In 100 years, highly intelligent robots that can perform robotic surgery may appear. They’ll likely be able to perform a series of robotic steps and talk to you. So I can imagine that world and I can’t believe it’s even close to reality. Again, if you’re trying to bend the cost curve, I think the key is where you can do the same work with fewer people. However, I must reiterate that one of the problems facing the medical industry is the lack of police officers. It must be done in a way that does more than just improve some measure of patient care or outcome. Improve your experience. And if you can do that, it’s a win. Otherwise, if we had the same reimbursement system and chased the dollar the same way, the nurse-to-patient ratio would go down, we would have robots in the room, we would have a dystopia.
Q4: What’s scariest about AI in healthcare?
What scares me most about AI in healthcare is what I fear most about AI in general. That is, so far we seem to be dependent on a very small number of companies competing for near-monopoly status. In such a world, the opportunities and opportunities to realize not only the savings but also the efficiencies and less commercial aspects of some of the benefits of AI will be curtailed, curtailed, and constrained by business considerations, monopolies, and the inability of small operators to actually deploy the tools and enter the market.
Well, that’s it for today. See you next time. If you are interested in our activities, events, and publications, please visit lowninstitute.org to check them out.
