AI versus doctors

What is AI really good for when it comes to medicine?

- GINA KOLATA

NOT JUST PATIENTS, even doctors are increasingly turning to chatbots for many answers. Like practising a difficult conversation with a dying patient, reading scans and images or writing appeals to insurance companies when a medication or procedure is denied.

So what is a doctor for?

AI programmes are becoming 'existentially threatening' for doctors, Dr Jonathan Chen, an internist at Stanford, said. "They threaten your identity and your purpose."

Dr Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale and adviser to OpenEvidence, an AI programme for doctors, agrees. "AI's reasoning and ability to make diagnoses is already outpacing what physicians can do," said Dr Krumholz, who is also a co-founder of two startups using AI to interpret medical scans and digital data.

Dr Chen said he and many of his colleagues were being forced to ask, "When is it time to just get out of the way and let a computer take over?" Dr Chatbot isn’t quite ready to see you now, researchers say. But AI is starting to change what some doctors do, and which patients they see. AI, said Dr Robert Califf, a cardiologist at Duke and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, is taking over what he called "some of the scutwork" that doctors have to do now, like making notes about patient visits. But even with the sum of medical knowledge in its servers, it may not be enough to let the bots take over care for patients.