American Medical Association to advise on the use of AI in medicine

The American Medical Association announced that it will be devising a set of recommendations and principles to help providers and patients navigate the growing presence of augmented intelligence in medicine.

The June 13 announcement comes as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now cleared more than 500 healthcare AI algorithms. This, combined with the rapid emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, among other things, prompted AMA to propose steps that will advise both physicians and patients about the benefits and risks of AI in medicine. 

“AI holds the promise of transforming medicine. We don’t want to be chasing technology. Rather, as scientists, we want to use our expertise to structure guidelines and guardrails to prevent unintended consequences, such as baking in bias and widening disparities, dissemination of incorrect medical advice, or spread of misinformation or disinformation,” AMA Trustee Alexander Ding, MD, MS, MBA, said in a prepared statement. 

Ding added that there are both promises and limitations with AI, and that as its popularity continues to grow in medical settings, there is “a lot of uncertainty about the direction and regulatory framework for this use.” 

The AI announcement was made during the Annual Meeting of the AMA House of Delegates. There, physicians agreed to compile a set of principles and recommendations related to the good, bad and ugly of AI—from how it can improve workflows and alleviate burnout, to the harms that AI-generated misinformation can cause. 

The goal is to inform users on how to best utilize AI tools while also practicing caution, as many are still in their early stages of deployment and can pose risks.

“Moving toward creation of consensus principles, standards, and regulatory requirements will help ensure safe, effective, unbiased, and ethical AI technologies, including large language models and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) [are developed] to increase access to health information and scale doctors' reach to patients and communities,” Ding said. “We are entering this brave new world with our eyes wide open and our minds engaged.”