The introduction of artificial intelligence into healthcare means that doctors could be replaced, which is why Google's head of health is warning about the impact it could have on our lives.
Dr Karen DeSalvo said in an interview with Guardian Australia last week, “We have a lot of work to do to make sure that AI models follow the ethical approaches that we want them to follow.”
Artificial intelligence, according to DeSalvo, would be a "tool" for doctors and could help support workforce shortage issues and improve the quality of care provided to people. It would mainly fill gaps, but would not replace doctors.
As a doctor I sometimes say, "Oh, there's this new stethoscope in my toolbox called a large language model, and it's going to do a lot of amazing things. It's not going to replace doctors but it's adding a new tool to our work."
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LLMs were fed 3,173 of the most common medical questions searched online, and the results showed that the Med-PaLM system produced answers that were identical to those of clinicians in 92.9% of cases. Answers that were assessed as potentially harmful occurred in 5.8%. Therefore, further evaluation is required.
DeSalvo said it was still in a “testing and learning phase,” but LLMs could be the best interns for a doctor by putting every textbook in the world at their fingertips.
It should never replace humans in diagnosing and treating patients, he said, suggesting there will be concerns about the potential for misdiagnosis, with early LLMs being prone to what is called “ AI.”
“One of the things we really focus on at Google is tuning and constraining the model in a way that makes it workable,” he said. “A patient wants to know that the doctor they’re talking to is knowledgeable, right?”
DeSalvo said the ultimate goal was to address the information imbalance between the medical industry and the public and give as much power as possible to patients.
Information is a determining factor for health and is only achieved when people understand and know about a possible condition.
"When I was in practice, I liked it when patients showed up with printed sheets or a notebook, with all their health information written down, and we could have a nice conversation.".
Source: www.theguardian.com
