AI and medicine The DO Book Club, September 2023: “The Algorithm Will See You Now” J.L. Lycette, MD, imagines a future in which artificial intelligence (AI) has been so thoroughly integrated into the practice of medicine that an AI algorithm is making life-and-death decisions for patients. Sept. 1, 2023FridaySeptember 2023 issue The DO Book Club Joan Naidorf, DO Joan Naidorf, DO, is an emergency physician, speaker, and author from Alexandria, Virginia. Contact Dr. Naidorf
Funding available for osteopathically focused research projects Research funding is available to DO, MD, PhD and osteopathic medical student researchers conducting studies that address the tenets of osteopathic medicine and explore the profession’s patient-centered, empathic approach to care.
CMS to provide Hurricane Helene public health emergency accelerated and advance payments to Medicare providers Payments will provide health care providers in affected areas with immediate access to necessary funds to continue delivering critical care.
knowledge and wisdom are two separate fields.Health care involves caring ….caring for another person…AI can present data and give standard explanations with cascades of algorithms but it can not care. It can present knowledge and protocols and try to explain…but that is the minimum and easy part of our profession.The physician’s profession is to also give peace of mind…to comfort …to reasure…to coach ..to encourage…to support…and ultimately to have the patient’s back so that the patient knows that costs and statistics are not making the decisions. How many insurance malpractice cases are a result of the patient or the family being told “there is nothing we can do” (oh…we didn’t bother mentioning that a tertiary referral center might be able to fix this issue….oh we forgot to mention that end of life care doesn’t have to start today). Trust but verify. Who will be monitoring the programing (insurance companies, the government), who monitors the data entry (oh the patient is 19 not 91), etc.The engineering analogy still hold true…the physician is not the conductor on the train punching the ticket, nor the driver at the controls of the locomotive…the physician is the one who lays the track and gives the direction where the train shall go. The patient is the one which tells the physician which stop they are planning to get off at and if the physician and the patient interact properly the journey not only lasts longer but it will be better. Sep. 21, 2023, at 8:26 am Reply
The algorithmic divide presents huge ethical issues with AI especially in health care. We need to understand who creates each algorithm before any AI is placed in a decision tree format. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-looming-algorithmic-divide-navigating-the-ethics-of-ai/ Sep. 21, 2023, at 8:48 am Reply