While advancing computer technology brings us opportunities to improve medical care both for research and for individual patients, it also presents new choices to make about how we deliver health care. This technology crosses new horizons, allowing us to process vast amounts of medical data, for both large groups of people and individuals. This data processing capability will inevitably change how medicine is delivered, but we must intentionally choose what direction those changes go in. In the exam room with a single patient, where provider and patient sit face to face, the choice of how we use this technology will determine whether we treat that patient as a person or as a project.
Over the past decades, technology has changed medical care for the better. Paper records moved into electronic medical records, enabling better tracking and care delivery. New devices offered quicker and more accurate test results or more effective therapies. New lab tests offered diagnostic capabilities for previously undiagnosable conditions.
We can be thankful for these advances, but they brought changes to how people were treated. At times, people can become collections of lab results. At times, the person simply becomes patient number 3558 rather than a John Smith, husband of Jane, father of Jack, etc. With Big Medicine and electronic medical records, each person can be tracked and monitored as a data point.
Then comes Artificial Intelligence. AI brings a whole new level of potential benefit and potential change to the fundamentals of how we care for people. When used as a tool, it equips providers sitting in front of their patients with greater abilities to diagnose and individualize care. Personalized genetic-influenced approaches to care are only possible with technology like AI; the amount of information to be processed is just too much for an unaided single provider.
However, when AI steps into the exam room and sits down in the provider’s chair to face the patient directly, we’re crossing a line. Maybe a provider stops thinking for himself and just follows the prompts and recommendations by a computer program. Maybe a patient looks to an online automated service, answering a few basic questions and sending in some blood samples. In getting access to some tests that their ‘regular doctor’ won’t order, they lose out on the human touch and have to depend on an AI program to answer their questions.
As with anyone trying to decide whether to move forward with fundamental changes to an established system, we need to consider pros and cons in light of what we are aiming for. Yes, the healthcare system is already broken and screams for solutions. Many are stuck with providers who see them as numbers requiring a pharmaceutical solution
so that insurance will reimburse the 12-minute visit with enough money to make a paycheck. Not everyone is in that situation. Many good providers are out there. Too many patients, however, are trapped by the broken system’s lack of ‘good’ providers.
Still, will this changeover to AI providers fix the brokenness or just create opportunities for a different brokenness? There are definite pros to using AI as a tool to augment providers’ ability to diagnose and treat, like Iron Man’s suit gives him superpowers. As in the oft-repeated movie plot, though, when we let technology take over, the evil robot always comes with at least a lack of empathy for the human condition. Regardless of which movie you’re remembering, it was always a very early choice that we as humanity made in how we used technology which ultimately determined the movie’s final scene. In light of that, as we search for healthier, more abundant life, should we hand over the role of the human provider to a machine like AI?
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Dr. Eric Potter graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School and then went on to specialize in internal medicine (adult) and pediatric care, spending significant time and effort in growing his medical understanding while caring for patients from all walks of life.
