FEAR, UNCERTAINTY & DOUBT of AI is threatening healthcare professionals, vendors, and systems WHY?

FEAR, UNCERTAINTY & DOUBT #fud that #chatgpt #bard, #medpalm and emerging AI is threatening traditional healthcare professionals and vendors and systems. Don’t get me wrong, it is shaking multiple industries all over – not just health care. This post is a bit long as a positive response to?A recent article by amazing @Bill Crounse on LinkedIn that went viral with comments showing emotions, empathy, and passion among the MDs and healthcare community. Please read that article and some of the comments so you can understand this article better. Here is the link

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/billcrounse_ai-medicine-doctors-activity-7027004827272445952-vqs3?

I thank doctor Bill Crounse, MD immensely for his post which opened a great dialogue with diverse, supportive, alternate, opposite, and respectful opinions. Granted, there are a few comments in his post by people throwing FUDs and yet to be convinced. Most comments are well-balanced questions, thoughts, and opinions from many audiences around the world. I suggest if you are passionate read them and his respectful, clear, kind responses to their concerns on this subject. I wanted to add a few thoughts.

UPFRONT TRANSPARENCY: I am neither a Doctor/MD nor do I play one on TV <smile>. I may be on TV as a MasterChef, but I have 50+MDs in my close family thanksgiving table (wife, daughter, sister, brother-in-law, etc). Most of all, I am a patient who has overcome and managed chronic conditions (SleepApnea & Type2Diabetes in the past 20 yrs). Since 1988, for over 32 years, I grew my career in technology as innovations like DOS 2.0 (not many remember), Macs, PCs, LAN/WAN, Internet, Wireless, Mobile, IoT, DigitalHealth, Cloud, and AI-based platform economy evolved. For the past 12 years, I spent on Cloud, DigitalHealth, IoT, RPM, and emerging technology in our F100 top healthcare ecosystem. So please don't comment that I am no MD, I don't treat patients, or not a healthcare professional - My view is from the following perspective.

So, I wanted to provide a Human, patient, entrepreneur, tech evangelist, and Health-tech view on this topic with some simple history and analogy. My LinkedIn article on a similar subject of disruption and innovation is here for more detail. It is about WHY our US HEALTHCARE system spends the most (4.2 trillion) and yet only ranks 28th among all countries. Here is the link to the article from Feb’2022.?A key point to note: about 900B of this money is spent on administrative systems, duplicate data, manual workflow, EMR/EHR and many siloed IT systems. We will have to write a separate article on how AI and Blockchain will disrupt that. There are many experts who have done so.

Http://bit.ly/platformhealth

IMHO (perhaps with a futurist technologist bias): I wrote the above article a year ago obviously long before current #Chatgpt trends. ?I gave many historical examples and analogies of how emerging technology will change the way we are born, grow, buy, eat, build, entertain, travel, live, and perish. Also, how companies that don’t adopt technology will disappear and become extinct. Technology fueled by innovation will make us live: an easier, happier, and longer life. Our life expectancy has improved by 10+ years since the 1900s -no one can argue this fact.

Let’s now dive into the topic of AI/ML emerging technology in healthcare. As a 35yr veteran of technology, engineering, and DigitalHealth I always think that every innovation can be used for good and bad.

Chef’s Analogy: A good strong sharp chef’s knife when used craft-fully can help a chef make a masterclass meal… when not careful it can cut his entire arm. In the wrong hands (a criminal mind) the knife can kill a human or even a large animal.

Let's ALL AGREE: AI is a TOOL and will not replace the POWER of HUMANS in healthcare for now. At least not in our current lifetime… maybe in years 3000+ but doubtful.?Then why are most people scared of adopting AI in healthcare!? Giving excuses for HIPAA, Privacy, Security, Accuracy, Empathy, and what I call FUD (FEAR of losing a job, UNCERTAINTY of accuracy, DOUBT of big brother). AI will not create weaker security, less privacy, or violate HIPAA.

Many HCPs/MDs don’t even know that they are currently using the benefits of AI in everything today and in healthcare from advances in pharmaceutical, covid vaccines, robotic surgery, Radiology imaging, cardiologist ECG (12 lead algorithms like Utah/Glasgow), and much more. Imagine an ECG tech or cardiologist going through every beat in 5GB of ECG data to detect one of the 929 conditions/faults in your heart. This has been improved over the past 30+ years and used globally by MDs. ECG technology advances using AI have made it easier and more accurate to detect more Cardiac conditions over the years as datasets increased. It is more accurate than 50 years ago.

Then what is the problem?

Accepting and trusting a machine is hard and especially when it comes at an expense of your life or a loved one’s life. But 90% of the people forget that you take the same symptoms and patient cases with the same data to 100 human doctors, and you will get 10 different diagnostics (empathy aside). I am not talking about a broken leg here. I am talking about tough difficult complex comorbid disease conditions perhaps with multiple chronic diseases, drug regimens, and symptoms. In worse cases, late/wrong diagnosis and wrong drugs and misdiagnosed treatment side effects could be catastrophic. ?The correct diagnostics depend on their education, knowledge, experience, and practice. They need to be on top of emerging research, diseases, new proven treatments, and pharmaceuticals that can cure. How can primary care or a specialist read 1M publications on their field?

Some proven cancer treatments take 5+ years for your oncologist to learn and get access to. But AI democratizes “proven peer-reviewed knowledge” to all MDs worldwide. It is almost like you have access to a great chemistry teacher 24x7 who knows all new inventions as well. Not just for you but for all students around the globe. Memorizing and vomiting in our 100-year-old education system will be obsolete as well. Using it as a tool, every oncologist will have the ability to make better diagnoses, care, and treatment.

I want to remind the reader that I am talking about proven peer-reviewed knowledge which is what usually is used to train critical healthcare transformer models for continuous learning. Not captured by an internet search on someone's opinion captured by ChatGPT or prioritized and forced up by paid google #adwords. The technologist will take care of that. Remember, the AI continuously learns from the experts and gets more accurate and CONSISTENT.?Training with larger and more diverse cultural datasets can improve application across age, gender, culture, and race. In many fields of medicine given the data/symptoms and images, AI diagnosis has beaten human MDs by 10% or more. ?That said, there is a human element of caring that always can be given by physicians. So it is not about AI or Doctors it is Doctors+AI.

Healthcare is about accurately predicting, preventing, curing diseases, and extending life with an icing of empathy and love where needed. Bill Crounse, MD answers in the comments articulated this well. Many who brought the concerns via comments failed to see the leaves, branches, and trees from the forest. I mean the big picture of technology helping them to do a better, faster & accurate job.

As Bill Crounse, MD and the medical futurist Bertalan Meskó, MD, PhD , and a few experts have said “AI will NOT REPLACE doctors but A doctor with AI WILL REPLACE the one WITHOUT”.?I add that good old saying to Keep in mind “A FOOL with a TOOL is still a FOOL”. We need open caring, informed, and continuously learning medical professionals armed with AI and all emerging tools at their fingertips. Their work is unforgiving and we need to arm them with every technology to help keep us healthier.

If interested, please read my other two LinkedIn posts/views on WHY in 2023 and beyond “AI will change our 200yr old education system” “AI will change healthcare delivery systems” and much more…

https://bit.ly/aiin-education

https://bit.ly/aichangehealth

I welcome your collective constructive thoughts and comments!? Please start the dialogue so we catalyze the disruption to benefit humankind.