The AI effect: How AI is making health care more human
MIT Technology Review | GE Healthcare
Health-care institutions have been anticipating the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the performance and efficiency of their operations and their workforces—and the quality of patient care. But many have already been reaping the benefits of AI tools. And contrary to common, yet unproven, fears that machines will replace human workers, AI technologies in health care may actually be “re-humanizing” health care, just as the system itself shifts to value-based care models that may favor the outcome patients receive instead of the number of patients seen.
A survey of more than 900 health-care professionals by MIT Technology Review Insights, in association with GE Healthcare, finds that health-care professionals are already using AI to improve data analysis, enable better diagnoses and treatment predictions, and free medical staff from administrative burdens. These findings are even more critical as health-care delivery and administration are becoming more complex and costly, and professional and technological capacity is ever more burdened, with doctors buried amid vastly expanding workloads and administrative, lower-yield work, and patients robbed of personal interactions with their physicians.
For one, machines must work for doctors and clinicians, not the other way around; much patient consultation time is spent entering data, not drawing inference from it. This, however, is largely an evolutionary transition in the adoption of AI. More important, health-care organizationsmust allow for fundamental shifts in how patients are cared for—doctors and other health-care workers must leverage increasingly comprehensive pools of AI-mediated medical data to make decisions in collaboration with machines.
