Rahul Kamath THUMB

Rahul Kamath

Insights & Strategy

Design Strategy

Since their launch late in 2022, Artificial Intelligence tools like <a href="https://chat-gpt.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ChatGPT</a> and <a href="https://stablediffusionweb.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">StableDiffusion</a> have captured both the popular imagination and the attention of pundits across almost every sector. 
In fact, many of us at Delve consider advances in AI image and text generation to be among the <a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/biggest-innovations-in-2022-that-influenced-product-design" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">biggest innovations of 2022</a> to influence product design. For those of who have been observing this new AI spring, it's impossible not to wonder just how it might change the way we live and work.

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Continue this conversation on LinkedIn! Follow Rahul's <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulkamath/" target="_blank">LinkedIn page</a> and share your thoughts about this blog post <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rahulkamath_how-will-ai-transform-healthcare-ive-been-activity-7041780726714748928-FyDU?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop" target="_blank">here.</a>

<h2>But will AI fix healthcare?</h2>
As a design strategist at <a href="https://www.delve.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Delve</a>, I spend a lot of time researching and thinking about healthcare and its future. I've learned that managing the cost of and access to healthcare is a deeply intractable problem spanning just about every country on earth. It’s exactly for this reason that I expect the healthcare sector to embrace AI—as a tool to finally bridge these gaps.

I came across an <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertpearl/2023/02/13/5-ways-chatgpt-will-change-healthcare-forever-for-better/?sh=331e603f7bfc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">article</a> a few days ago that paints a very rosy picture of how this will happen. The author, Robert Pearl, is a board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon, a clinical professor of surgery at Stanford University, and on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He listed five ways he expects AI, specifically ChatGPT, to transform healthcare:

<ul><li>By becoming exponentially faster and more powerful.</li><li>By emulating how doctors make clinical decisions.</li><li>By providing around-the-clock medical assistance.</li><li>By preventing medical errors.</li><li>By helping all doctors perform like the best.</li></ul>
Dr. Pearl’s enthusiasm is palpable as he lays out his rosy vision of the future of his profession, thanks to the wisdom of ChatGPT. It’s hard to blame him. If there’s one thing this sector needs, it’s everything: better access, increased precision, improved speed, and lower costs.
I have to admit, however, that Dr. Pearl’s article caught my attention mainly because it represents what I perceive as an extremely optimistic view of the benefits AI might deliver over the next ten years. Given the state of U.S. healthcare, it’s tempting to believe that we are farther along on the path to affordable, high-quality health care than we may really be. But it's just not realistic.

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We had a great discussion about the ways AI will impact the medical device industry.

<h2>The Unsexy Truth: Dirty Data</h2>
The first reason I’m dubious that AI will have a transformative impact on healthcare in the near term is that highly unsexy counterpart to Artificial Intelligence: Data Quality.
I have worked with big data sets for many years. Rarely have I encountered rigorous data collection methods that produce high quality data to clear standards and in large amounts.
Healthcare data is no different. Except, as you can imagine, there is a unique danger when data inputs are not properly vetted in the healthcare space. The age-old principle, “Garbage In/Garbage Out” applies here—except here, the garbage could potentially kill you.
It was <a href="https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">revealed</a> that even OpenAI employed the use of low-wage human workers in Kenya to manually sift through data and validate inputs for ChatGPT software—by all accounts, a very tedious and often disturbing job. I’m not qualified to speak to how medical data needs to be vetted or trained for AI use, but I can say that that the standards need to be very high. Introducing the technology to the clinical setting at the population level would involve substantial risk otherwise.
In fact, I anticipate legal guardrails being established around any AI claiming to dispense clinical insight. This would be a good thing. Without a foundation of proper data collection and training, there is a very real risk that AI might provide terrible advice, or of healthcare providers treating AI like an oracle instead of a second medical opinion.
This is just plain dangerous.
Until proper guardrails are in place (and even after, for that matter), doctors must maintain an awareness of what data went into creating any given AI-generated insight. Only this way can they maintain a realistic sense of its value and potential risks.

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<h2>Loss of Context Awareness</h2>
Which brings me to my second point about AI’s impact in the clinical setting. We’ve seen that AI can synthesize coherent, remarkably human speech and provide remarkable insights. But, for now, it lacks the ability to independently gather immediate context about the situation it is commenting on— the kinds of things a human would use their physical senses to apprehend. I would describe this as context awareness.
A good medical doctor is likely to rely heavily on their senses in a clinical setting. They would observe the pallor of someone’s skin, the smell of their body, the appearance of their eyes, the sound of their breathing, the cadence of their speech, and so on. These are very important diagnostic clues. We should worry about whether AI’s value in promoting patient throughput will lead doctors to surrender their attention and context-awareness to get patients in and out more quickly. In this respect, drifting towards heavy reliance on AI would not lead to fewer medical errors, and could potentially increase them.
On top of this, we must also consider the impact that an empathic healthcare provider has on patient outcomes. No AI has yet been developed that can exercise human empathy.

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<h2>AI Will Augment, Not Replace Humans in Healthcare</h2>
It is for this reason that, despite all the talk about AI “replacing” us, for at least the immediate future, I see a much bigger role for it&nbsp;augmenting us.
In the clinical setting, I would expect to see AI used in very specific, controlled, and repeatable ways, such as onloading repetitive and high-cognition tasks that would be time-consuming, tedious, or difficult for a healthcare provider to do with high efficiency and accuracy. These tasks could fast-track a patient encounter to clinical value—scanning an x-ray for a malignancy, for example—but only after substantial patient engagement and information gathering has funneled the patient to that point.

I am excited about where AI will take us in healthcare, but there are some challenges we will need to negotiate and serious dangers we must guard against.
We’ll discuss the challenges in more depth here on the Delve blog over the coming weeks. For now, I’ll say this. Overcoming these barriers will be important to achieving broader goals of equity in healthcare. The pace may be slower than we wish, but I feel we have good reason to hope that the pieces are aligning toward a better healthcare paradigm. And there’s no question in my mind that data and AI will be at the center of the revolution.
I’d love to hear what you think! Let me know on my <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7041780726714748928/" target="_blank">LinkedIn post</a>.

Learn more about <a href="https://www.delve.com/services" target="_blank">Product Development & Design Services at Delve.</a>

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I am excited about where AI will take us in healthcare, but there are some challenges we will need to negotiate and serious dangers we must guard against.

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Will AI and ChatGPT really transform clinical healthcare for the better?

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