A new study came out in Nature and here is what they supposedly found:
An artificial intelligence (AI) system trained to conduct medical interviews matched, or even surpassed, human doctors’ performance at conversing with simulated patients and listing possible diagnoses on the basis of the patients’ medical history1.
The chatbot, which is based on a large language model (LLM) developed by Google, was more accurate than board-certified primary-care physicians in diagnosing respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, among others. Compared with human doctors, it managed to acquire a similar amount of information during medical interviews and ranked higher on empathy.
I call BS on all this. The goal is obvious: replace physicians. The C-Suite executives hate us and want cheaper labor. They have done that over the years with NPs and PAs and now they want AI. Also, this experiment was done the following way:
To test the system, researchers enlisted 20 people who had been trained to impersonate patients, and got them to have online text-based consultations — both with AMIE and with 20 board-certified clinicians. They were not told whether they were chatting with a human or a bot.
So, the AI won because it can spew out beautifully written prose. Great. It also can access info much faster than doctors can. TIME is a critical component of all this. Those doctors in the system will always lose due to being rushed. That is why they burn out. Do you know who has all the time needed to make accurate diagnoses and empathize with patients? Yup, you guessed it, Direct Primary Care doctors.
This is not to say we can’t be better. In my Churn book, I talk about how to email people the right way. There are simple tricks to do this well and you have to because patients cannot tell the tone in emails and it can get you into trouble. It did for me until I learned to do it right.