Artificial Intelligence in patient care - research presented at ASH23 by Dana-Farber's Andrew Hantel, MD, surveys oncologists about their feelings on incorporating AI into patient care.
We actually didn't really know what the practicing clinicians um viewpoints were understanding of A I was. Um And so we wanted to, to understand this not only for physicians at Dana Farber, um who might have, you know, kind of a, a greater understanding of artificial intelligence given that a lot of their colleagues perform this research. Um But really, uh the broad swath of oncologists across the United States, unlike prior surveys that had been done maybe five or more years ago, um with this explosion of information about the things A I can do for us, oncologists were actually a lot more optimistic these days than they used to be about how impactful A I can be in terms of not only their practice but their ability to help patients. And so there was a lot of optimism in our ability to diagnose treat, make decisions that are both appropriate and personalized to patients as well as some of the different ways that um A I can affect our ability to interact with patients in a positive way. And at the same time, clinicians were really um struggling with understanding, you know, how deferential to be to A I because, um, you know, by, by way of what A I is, it has access to a lot more information at any one time than we do. But when people were making decisions, they were kind of deferring to the A I in some cases and when there was disagreements, they were actually just reporting things to the patient and saying, um, you know, I don't under, I don't want the same kind of treatment choice as the A I is delivering. Um And we're just kind of gonna present this to you as the patient to make the decision. And so that kind of spoke to a little bit of the uh lack of understanding on the clinicians part and really like, they don't know right now how much they're gonna need to kind of be the the steward of the A I versus defer defer to the A I and really work with the patient amongst this. So those were some of the more interesting um kind of things that came out from the survey. I think there's a lot of takeaways in terms of developing a lot of these A I uh tools ethically and really our ability to not only develop them ethically but really support oncologists and being able to use them in a way that enhances their practices, enhances patient care.
