When a simple medical test revealed that I may have a heart problem, I fed the report into the AI to get answers right away instead of waiting for my doctor to respond.
AI explained my diagnosis, the possible outcomes, and the medications available for treatment. Sounds helpful, doesn’t it?
But it also said the disease causes sudden death and I would need immediate open heart surgery. Forget the diagnosis, that alone almost gave me a heart attack.
Luckily the AI was a bit overzealous. Although it gave me some accurate information, not all of it was accurate. In fact, my condition was completely controllable with a simple prescription.
According to a KFF tracking survey, one in three adults have used AI for health information and advice in the last year, and two in three of respondents said they use AI to find out more about their health problems before seeing a doctor. As AI becomes more advanced, it almost seems like chatbots will one day replace doctors. Even some clinicians fear they will eventually become obsolete.
The good news is that this probably won’t happen anytime soon. “For the foreseeable future, much of what medical professionals do will require judgment,” said Robert Wachter, MD, chair of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and author of “A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.”
We dug into the research to find out exactly what AI can and can’t do, what the future looks like, and why we’ll always need people in healthcare.
