Can AI help doctors act more humanely?

In this episode of GZERO AI, Taylor Owen, host of the Machines Like Us podcast, explores the rather surprising role that artificial intelligence can play in the healthcare industry’s efforts to reconnect with humanity. Doctors have become busier and are spending less time with their patients, but AI is being considered as a solution to enable them to foster more human connection.

So if there’s one sector of our economy and society that could use a real transformation, it’s our healthcare system. No matter where you live in the world, no matter what your health care financial model is, it will almost certainly fail you in some way. And at the core of this is the relationship between a doctor and a patient.

As doctors have become busier and they are burdened with more and more responsibilities, they are spending less time with us, their patients. In the US, the average doctor’s appointment lasts only 7 minutes. In South Korea, it’s 2 minutes. And in the US, one of the consequences of this is that there are 12 million significant misdiagnoses each year, 800,000 of which result in death or disability.

Cardiologist, medical researcher and author Eric Topol says: “Medicine has become inhumane.” Paradoxically, however, Topol thinks AI can make him more human. In its most basic form, this means bringing AI into the patient-doctor conversation. This could mean AI transcribing our conversations and allowing a doctor to pay attention to us, rather than typing on a computer screen. It also opens up the range of capacities in which they can be assisted by AI. This could be making our next appointments, following up on our treatment plans, or perhaps more powerfully, helping with the diagnoses themselves. A doctor has a very limited view of our current condition. And AI can have much greater visibility. Just do radiological scans. Topol says an artificial intelligence could add superhuman eyes to the doctor’s capacity. When a radiology scan is ordered, the radiologist is usually told to look for a specific thing, but an AI can look for anything and will have access to potentially rich and detailed views of our health history. Retinal scans are another example. An AI could detect everything from diabetes, kidney disease, potentially Alzheimer’s, just by looking into our eyes.

Another powerful potential here is predicting the future. The health care profession is not only about diagnosing our current conditions, but it should be about helping to protect us from possible conditions in the future. And an AI can help process datasets about our bodies, our health history, our family history, our genetics, and potentially predict what we’re more sensitive to in the future. So could we potentially use AI 20 years before someone evolves into a condition, like Alzheimer’s, and help develop treatment and medical plans and lifestyle adjustments accordingly? The potential is really there.

And one thing seems abundantly clear, that it will completely transform what it means to be a doctor. Doctors will not have to memorize things and repeat conditions from a textbook by heart, as we currently train them. But instead, we can test doctors for their human relationships, for their emotional intelligence, and for their empathy. As Topol says, this could eventually mean a shift in the system from recovery to recovery.

I’m Taylor Owen and thanks for watching.