I'm not trying to say that AI is good or bad in healthcare but thought it could add to the conversation about what I heard ( as I remember it!). About 10 years ago I sat in on presentations by Google X (The R&D arm of Google) and IBM Watson. They both said they were going to get into health care through "big data" and become a major player, While Chat GPT is a different company the use of AI / data has been in development for a while. The two examples they gave back then was:
Dermatology- it takes forever to get an appointment and conditions like a mole growth could advance before a doctor could see it. They ran a program where a patient took a picture, sent it to the AI, and AI had a high accuracy rate of diagnosing if it was benign or needed to been seen quickly. The patients that needed to be seen quickly got into the practice much faster then previously.
Oncology: They analyzed several conditions ( cant remember which but some could be gene typed). By analyze I mean they scoured the internet for every peer reviewed study, every treatment protocol they could find, every poster presentation made at various oncology conferences, and interviewed about 100 leading oncologists and spun it through the AI they had at the time and came up with optimal treatment protocols for those conditions. Their outcome was for those conditions they studied was if they followed the protocols they had a 90% accuracy rate for diagnosis and treatment. The other 10% that were identified were flagged to the practice for more intensive care and other protocols.
My 2 cents editorial comments. Doctors have incredibly difficult jobs. Shrinking reimbursement, more demand as boomers age, and an expectation from the public that they are always avaible on a minutes notice, and know everything about all the conditions they treat. I knew an oncologist who worked at Dana Farber cancer center. He saw his hospital patients 7 to 8:30 am, did paperwork for about an hour, then saw his in office patients during the day. Many days after 5 he went back to hospital to see patients. With this type of schedule he was also expected to keep up with the newest treatments and take continuing education courses to stay current. This is impossible as there are only so many hours in a day. If AI can help doctors be more current, accurate, and remove mundane tasks and help with some diagnosis to free up their time to work on the more challenging cases I'm all for it. Time will tell if AI lives up to the hype.