“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses," automotive pioneer Henry Ford once famously said. Consumers couldn't envision a vehicle without a horse—much less a vehicle that tells the driver how to get to the destination, takes phone calls, streams every kind of music imaginable, and automatically calls for help in a crash.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our lives in even more ways than the horseless carriage. In just a few short years, many of us have gone from being slightly suspicious of AI to allowing Alexa and Siri to choose our music, order us pizza, and decide what temperature our house should be.
In healthcare, AI is currently experiencing “faster horse syndrome," mostly used to perform familiar tasks more quickly and accurately. Patient monitors alert ICU staff to impending crises, and decision support systems flag the most recent research developments for a given diagnosis, saving the physician from a time-consuming literature search.
The healthcare AI transformation is in its earliest stages. As health information systems come to depend on AI, a plethora of new uses—and eventually a whole new infrastructure—will redefine how care is delivered, in the same way the automobile has transformed our landscape, hopefully without harmful side effects analogous to urban sprawl and air pollution.
“Computers are beginning to program themselves and access electronic data in a timeframe that permits making decisions based on huge amounts of data," says Ed Hammond, director of the Center for Health Informatics at Duke University, and a pioneer of clinical computing. He points to robots that can increasingly handle unscripted conversations, and he predicts that driverless cars will eventually make roads safer and solve at least some of our traffic problems. “Computers and robots aren't going to be perfect, but they're going to learn from their mistakes and not make the same mistake twice. AI systems continue to learn, and I don't think clinicians do. They make the same mistakes more than once."
