Xprize AI physician? June 23, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Video.trackback
I’ve been promoting the idea of using social media and the internet in medicine and healthcare, but I’ve never meant that digital technology should substitute doctors so this Xprize announcement surprised me:
One of the exciting ideas being tossed around recently over at the Xprize Foundation is the creation of an Artificial Intelligence physician that you could access from your smartphone. Have a strange rash on your arm and chest? Take a photo of the rash with your phone and allow the AI physician to compute whether your rash matches smallpox or poison ivy from it’s image database. Want advice on whether your chest pain is heartburn or a heart attack? Ask the AI!
What do you think? Am I too conservative?
I’ve seen some people *hate* anything like this; most have had bad experiences with what I might call “shrinking care.” And I’m sure this technology could be used by bad providers to deliver less and less care.
BUT, I say think differently: today a subset of a physician’s skills can be offloaded due to IT including the internet. If I can snap a photo of a rash with my Blackberry and have it show me its closest matches, I wouldn’t call it a 100% diagnosis w/ prescription but I’d quickly be a lot more e: educated (informed), engaged, empowered – you know the drill.
Methinks we have a tendency (vendor and citizen alike) to think a new technology replaces something. In this case I think it’s just unbundling one tiny subskill.
And, the more I learn about health information, the more I see the validity of the hierarchy:
Data <=raw, dumb, useless without interpretation
Information <= data that's been given meaning
Knowledge
Wisdom
I got so wrapped up in that, I forgot to get back to the original point: I think it’s a complete misconstrual to assert that this technology is a “physician.”
If technology like this were fully developed it could be a great tool somewhere between the Information and Knowledge tiers, and it might someday be shown to be more accurate than 50% of docs on some particular topics. It might be a new tier of care for non-critical things, a first guess at a dx, but there’s no way I’d stop dealing with thinking physicians.
So now I wonder whether the Xprize announcement was written by leading health thinkers or by tech promoters unconstrained by deeper awareness. (Might be either – I’m just wondering.)
Maybe it was written by someone who’s tired of waiting two weeks for an appointment.
Only when the doc has actually seen it before, can he actually diagnose properly most of the time. Too many stories of wrong diagnosis or obvious guess-work by doctors….
In any case… this can work not just in the medical field…. just waiting for the more enterprising GP perhaps.
Only when the doc has actually seen it before, can he actually diagnose properly most of the time. Too many stories of wrong diagnosis or obvious guess-work by doctors….
In any case… this can work not just in the medical field…. just waiting for the more enterprising GP perhaps.
hy ………