Medical practice may change rapidly because of innovations in technology and artificial intelligence .Source: Green Butterfly/Shutterstock
We read printed medical journals regularly and attended medical conferences to keep up with new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. Pharmaceutical companies also provided access to new medical information related to the products they were selling.Articles and books were published that summarized medical evidence, and physicians have been encouraged to practice evidence-based medicine, i.e., practice medicine based on the results of scientific studies.
The patient visit time with specialists was cut back to 15 minutes. Sometimes, a physical examination was omitted, and sometimes, physicians barely looked patients in the eyes because they were spending so much time staring at their computers. I felt uncomfortable just following practice guidelines because such guidelines apply to the population as a whole but may not apply to the individual patient. I felt medical schools in the early part of the 21st century had trained physicians to act as medical technicians who follow protocols rather than teaching how to best practice the art of medicine.
The result of these changes could lead many physicians to rely exclusively on AI for their medical judgments, further reducing the role of art in medicine.may be stifled because “out-of-the-box” thinking would be less likely to occur in a setting where readily available definitive AI-directed care is considered “state of the art.”
Shifting the role of primary healthcare providers to technicians will have the benefits of decreased costs and increased accessibility to healthcare that could be provided by many more people.