concept of artificial intelligence, human brain with machinery

Four Roles for Artificial Intelligence in the Medical System

W. Nicholson Price Artificial Intelligence, Health Information Technology, Nicholson Price

How will artificial intelligence (AI) change medicine?

AI, powered by “big data” in health, promises to transform medical practice, but specifics remain inchoate.  Reports that AI performs certain tasks at the level of specialists stoke worries that AI will “replace” physicians.  These worries are probably overblown; AI is unlikely to replace many physicians in the foreseeable future.  A more productive set of questions considers how AI and physicians should interact, including how AI can improve the care physicians deliver, how AI can best enable physicians to focus on the patient relationship, and how physicians should review the recommendations and predictions of AI.  Answering those questions requires clarity about the larger function of AI: not just what tasks AI can do or how it can do them, but what role it will play in the context of physicians, other patients, and providers within the overall medical system.

Medical AI can improve care for patients and improve the practice of medicine for providers—as long as its development is supported by an understanding of what role it can and should play.

Four different roles each have the possibility to be transformative for providers and patients: AI can push the frontiers of medicine; it can replicate and democratize medical expertise; it can automate medical drudgery; and it can allocate medical resources.

This post originally appeared on Balkinization. Read the rest there.

W. Nicholson Price

Nicholson Price is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Previously, he taught law at the University of New Hampshire. He holds a PhD in Biological Sciences and a JD, both from Columbia, and an AB from Harvard. He clerked for Judge Carlos T. Bea on the Ninth Circuit, and was then appointed as an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard. Nicholson teaches patents and health law and studies life science innovation, including big data and artificial intelligence in medicine. He recommends reading Bujold, Jemisin, and Older. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, the Michigan Law Review, and elsewhere. Nicholson is cofounder of Regulation and Innovation in the Biosciences, co-chair of the Junior IP Scholars Association, and a Core Partner at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law.

One thought to “Four Roles for Artificial Intelligence in the Medical System”

  1. Loved this post. I agree that AI will not replace physicians in the foreseeable future but will definitely change the way they work and the type of patients and medical disorders they treat. We all know that most of the doctors’ work is routine, dealing with simple cases. As a Dermatologist, I can testify that most of my clinic work is around mild or moderate cases of acne, different simple fungal infection, etc. In acne, new medical mobile apps are offering patients a way to assess their acne severity on their iPhone and get personalized OTC medications to their home, physician free. This kind of AI-based services can reduce the number of acne cases physicians need to treat and let them focus on more severe complex cases that still need human skills.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.