i n terviews
Artificial Intelligence to put the care back in healthcare Interview with Dr. Eric Topol, digital health leader, physician-scientist, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, and author of the book “Deep Medicine. How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again”. Dr. Topol, you said that a visit to the doctor these days is mechanical and robotic, that medicine is broken. However, is digital healthcare itself an answer to such healthcare challenges as low quality care, long waiting times, rising costs, aging populations, or the rising burden of non-communicable diseases?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we dehumanize medicine any further, by making it virtual. But what I am suggesting is there are many things that we can off-load from the current standard and tradition, so that when a doctor and patient get together, it is for something urgent. For example, concerns like a urinary tract infection, an ear infection in a child, a skin rash, or many other things that are not serious – these could be handled by the people concerned, or by the parents if it is a child, without seeing a doctor at
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all, just using a virtual connection. This mechanism is one way to remove some of the overwhelming workload from doctors. Overwhelming due to the mismatches, for all the reasons you described, such as the aging population. However, this is only one part of the solution, there are many others. Doctors are still heavy keyboard users, even though we thought that AI would record the voice and transcribe it directly into notes. Liberation from the keyboard! We also see doctors toiling over charts to gather enough information about the patient, which could be done for them using suitable algorithms. These are some ways we can outsource this burden to machines, so that every visit to the doctor takes less time and is less prone to error, thus improving the whole relationship. In this way we could use digital tools to restore humanity in medicine.
Will AI give doctors the gift of time? Right now, many doctors are frustrated as they have even more work in this era of computers, as they spend time clicking instead of talking to the patient.
The gift of time can be illusory, because it can make things worse. Improving productivity and efficiency can also encourage administrators to think: “Oh good! Now you can see more patients and read more scans.” They then squeeze doctors more, making things worse. Already more than half of the doctors face burnout because they are unable to achieve their mission. This burning out of doctors is accompanied by a doubling of the medical error rates, and today about 20% of doctors suffer from clinical depression. This is a problem because administrators have already squeezed doctors to an unacceptable extent. It could
