Generative AI Will Expose Healthcare’s Ugly Identity Crisis
I’m the first one to tell you that there is a lot to be excited about when it comes to integrating artificial intelligence in both clinical medicine and the business of healthcare. Non-generative AI, on one hand, embodies a unique but harmless lens for communicating data to better convey the realities of medicine to the uninitiated. Generative AI, on the other, is something else altogether.
Generative AI feels like Thanksgiving with the whole family. It sounds magical on the surface. Who wouldn’t love an amazing meal surrounded by your people with a bona fide opportunity to reflect, recharge, and reconnect? It also sounds like the perfect solution for an aching healthcare system that could use a little reflection, recharging, and reconnection. The practice of medicine hinges on overstretched doctors and nurses whose primary focus should be managing human life and making real connection – but are instead fighting off the distraction of administrative redundancy and constant faceless downward pressure.
Generative AI may actually allow us to produce digital content and workflows with minimal prompting and cogent ease. We might not have to make the exact same sequences of 81 clicks and keystrokes all day every day for each and every patient. It could just learn what we want, execute these tasks with supervision, and streamline the entire $4.5 trillion industry. What if we could look at our patient in the eye with full attention – instead of worrying about documentation? What if we didn’t have to regularly choose between giving this patient our full attention or giving our family, our health, or our personal life the attention they deserve after business hours? What if the recurring decision between being present now and absent later – or absent now and present later – didn’t have to be the daily routine? But what if this is the patient that sues me because my documentation was insufficient – even if we explicitly discussed everything in person? But what if this is the patient that sues me because I didn’t make the human connection I should have? If we’re lucky, the software may even propose the magic words insurance plans need to see to check off their arbitrarily bespoke boxes to pay for the services they promised they would in the first place.
But you and I both know family reunions over Thanksgiving aren’t always clean. And generative AI won’t be either because I know what the rest of us in medicine know: we don’t know who we are – or where we’re going.
Like all AI, generative models produce content based on previously captured data from past behaviors. The only problem is our past behaviors are rooted in three major conflicts we are yet to reconcile – and the data shows we’ve been captured for a while now.
You can read the original article by Dr. Prem Ramkumar on Forbes Magazine online:
