AI news & views in brief: AI as healthcare cure-all, AI-experienced med students, more
If we would just let it do its thing, AI could fix practically everything that’s wrong with U.S. healthcare. A HealthExec editor didn’t say that. Joe Lonsdale did, albeit not in those exact words. “[O]ur government is going to go bankrupt as [healthcare] costs continue to compound, if we don’t ‘bend the curve,’” the billionaire co-founder of Palantir and other successful tech companies posted at his Substack column Dec. 3. And the only way to do the bending, he maintains, is to get productivity up—way up. “AI is the miracle that solves the existential problem [of unsustainable healthcare costs] for our civilization,” Lonsdale insists. “It also makes healthcare better and way more convenient for everyone.”
- Lonsdale makes the comments by way of introducing a white paper published online by 8VC, Lonsdale’s technology investment firm based in Austin, Texas. In “A Vision for Healthcare AI in America,” 8VC partner Sebastian Caliri and co-authors make a compelling if casual case for tapping AI to remake healthcare. They envision the technology maturing in stages until it finally becomes autonomous—triaging, diagnosing and treating patients. Where will flesh-and-blood clinicians fit in? “A human connection is essential to many aspects of medicine, and it is unlikely that the most effective way to deploy level 3 (autonomous) systems will be wholesale substitution of your doctor in most cases,” the authors state. “A better starting point to envision their role is asking: Where can autonomous systems do things that humans alone cannot?”
- “The American healthcare system causes all kinds of unnecessary suffering in obvious places like the hospital and in non-obvious places like your paycheck,” the authors write. “AI is our best hope to alleviate that suffering. This plan has ambiguities and ideas that will be wrong when making contact with reality but is our attempt to share a vision and a way to make that vision real.”
Tomorrow’s physicians arrive at medical school pre-equipped with AI street smarts. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It can be a positive as long as the med student learns to keep AI at the service of the doctor—and to keep any technology from inverting the human-over-machine hierarchy. Take it from Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the AI-forward Stanford University School of Medicine. Medical schools need to make sure that students going into medicine, Minor tells NPR, have “a real motivation based upon empathy, based upon a desire to interact with patients, to interact with families, and to be the type of information provider and caregiver that really demonstrates a humanistic approach to medical care.”
- Minor says he’s optimistic that AI and other emerging technologies will “help return humanism” to medicine by allowing clinicians to “devote more of their time to interacting with patients and less of their time to interacting with the information systems and the technology systems that surround us today and that are not going away.”
- More of the in-depth discussion here.
- More of the in-depth discussion here.
Safe, effective and efficient advancement of responsible healthcare AI is possible. All it takes is intentional, sustained effort and ongoing communication, feedback and collaboration by all stakeholders. OK, that’s a tall order for any one healthcare organization, let along for U.S. healthcare as a whole. Helpfully, the group describing the ideal scenario is no less an authority than the National Academy of Medicine. The new book is titled An Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct for Health and Medicine: Essential Guidance for Aligned Action. Consider its content here.
Also worthwhile:
- The trust gap: why AI in healthcare must feel safe, not just be built safe (World Economic Forum)
- AI comes of age (Columbia Mailman School of Public Health)
- Healthcare AI takes off despite patient concern (Forbes)
From HealthExec’s sibling news outlets:
- Most organizations using AI for radiology are unsure of its ROI (Radiology Business)
- AI has already transformed TAVR care—and the best is yet to come (Cardiovascular Business)
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.