AI to “completely transform” healthcare

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

Clinical practice will be “completely transformed” by technology within 20 years as multidisciplinary teams evolve to include machines, says Enrico Coiera.

Speaking in Auckland this month at the International Medical Symposium 2019, the director of the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University challenged attendees to consider, “what would it be like to have an AI that’s part of your multidisciplinary team?”

While there are challenges ahead with the use of artificial intelligence in health, Coiera argued that it is here to stay and that the future will be about humans and machines working together and complementing each other.

“I think this is going to be the first great period of AI challenging healthcare,” he said.

Challenges include questions around what an AI should be allowed to determine, such as triaging or end-of-life care.

“For me it’s about humans being in the loop and ethical decisions being the ones we own,” he said.

Another challenge is the issue of automation bias, where people delegate trust and autonomy to an AI or computer system because it usually works very well, but then become complacent about checking its decisions.

For example, a GP who prescribed a lethal cocktail of drugs to a patient then argued that the “computer didn’t tell me not to do it,” Coiera said.

In this way, while new technologies can make patients safer, they can also introduce new harm and there will always be side effects.

Coiera said the health system is hugely complex and while AI is trained to work for tasks “as imagined”, this does not mean it will work for patients in the real world, in particular, when it is taken out of the local context where it was developed and applied to other areas.

“The same AI with the same inputs will give you different outputs in different settings and that’s kind of a worry,” he told attendees.

He cautioned against rushing to use technology over human expertise, giving the example of AI-powered GP service Babylon Health reportedly missing signs of serious illness.

However, he acknowledged that AI is already changing clinical practice in areas such as London, where many young healthy people are choosing to leave their traditional GPs and join Babylon Health, leaving only the chronically ill on GP patient lists.

“Already we are seeing AI affecting quality of care and the business models of healthcare and that’s going to continue,” said Coiera.

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