Topic: Using AI to Make Healthcare Decisions
Grade: 93.75%
Abstract: The integration and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare decision making is drastically changing the healthcare industry. It is improving outcomes for patients, reducing costs, helping with staff shortages, and assisting medical practitioners in their work.
The benefits are demonstrable and numerous. The performance of AI relative to doctors, the improvements in diagnosis (particularly in medical imaging), the reduction in medical errors due to error flagging, the applications in surgery, AI’s ability to assist patients, and the likely trajectory of the software are very encouraging.
However, there are many difficulties and ethical questions raised that are not yet answered for. There is a need for accountability and transparency for patients, a likely need for reduced societal expectations of medical data privacy as AIs need a large amount of this data to process and learn from, and a need to mitigate AI biases to avoid worsening healthcare disparities for marginalized groups. The legal and regulatory obstacles are also quite extensive and medical AI literacy needs to be improved and more integrated into education. These issues will need to be addressed for this technology to reach its potential and achieve widespread use in daily clinical practice.