At the inaugural Frontiers in Medical AI Summit in October, thought leaders spoke of artificial intelligence and the future of health care.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming health care quickly, and modern doctors must be aware of how to leverage it to deliver the best possible patient care. By incorporating AI in disease detection, optimizing organizational efficiency, and even as virtual clinical assistants, today’s health care organizations are freeing up doctors’ time, allowing them to focus on their distinctly human skills.

To shine a light on this emerging reality was the goal of the inaugural Frontiers in Medical AI Summit at Kansas Health Science University (KHSU) in October. KHSU’s Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine (KansasCOM) integrates the topic of medical AI in its standard preclinical curriculum, and it will provide the conference annually for leaders in medicine and education as the use of AI continues to evolve in health care settings.

At the conference, expert speaker Dr. Calvin Chao, senior vice president of medical affairs at Tempus, illustrated the power of harnessing global patient data in disease detection and in predicting the effectiveness of treatments. Tempus’ suite of AI-enabled tools is currently being used by some oncologists, cardiologists, and neurologists to speed up their workflow and to offer a more holistic view of their patients’ medical journeys.

One technology from Tempus, a virtual clinical assistant called TempusOne, provides a glimpse into how health organizations are beginning to use AI in a familiar chatbot format to provide doctors fast access to pertinent information such as order status, reports, and up-to-date clinical trial information, saving them precious minutes and hours in patient interactions.

The Growing Influence of Medical AI

While easy-to-use technology such as virtual assistants provides clear advantages, the industry is yet to see widespread buy-in from providers. Today, the medical field is still in what Paul Misasi, Ph.D., program director of health systems science at KansasCOM, called a “land rush” era of AI adoption where startups and tech giants like Microsoft are vying for influence.

According to a 2023 Morgan Stanley Research survey, 94% of health care organizations reported that they were already using some kind of AI technology, and on average, they expected to nearly double their budget allocations for AI (to 10.5%) by 2024. Currently, the most popular integration of AI in medicine takes the form of algorithms that are built into diagnostic tools for image analysis.

Dasa Gangadhar, MD, senior associate dean for curriculum, clinical medicine, and GME at KansasCOM, says, “The first AI device that was approved by the FDA for autonomous use was in my field of ophthalmology. The original name was IDx-DR. It is an instrument whereby individuals with diabetes can have images taken of their retina, and, with better than 95% sensitivity and specificity, a determination could be made by the device alone, without any physician reading, whether that patient had visually significant diabetic retinopathy that would then require a referral to an ophthalmologist.”

Because every patient with diabetes should receive an annual screening examination, Dr. Gangadhar says, there are millions of these tests that need to be done each year, and AI imaging takes less time and is more accurate than a human physician.

To date, there are three AI algorithms approved by the FDA for the detection of diabetic retinopathy. A vast majority of FDA-approved AI medical devices, 95% , are used in radiology or cardiology to ultimately provide results to physicians who can interpret their findings for the patient.

The field of medicine can be slow to move to new technology due to legal considerations and it has been slower than other fields to adopt AI, in part, Dr. Gangadhar says, because of a “fear factor” in delegating care to a machine felt by patients and providers alike.

He says, “I think for the foreseeable future, even with situations with images, the machine can help us read them, but you’re going to have to have a human involved in overreading it or double-checking it.”

Some health systems are trialing AI technologies that go beyond analyzing images. Organizations are beginning to use AI for administrative tasks such as tracking hospital bed availability and monitoring staffing. Some doctors are even using AI as digital scribes.

Doctors in Kansas City-area hospitals are among the thousands of medical professionals using Abridge, a generative AI tool that summarizes medical conversations and integrates them with electronic medical record systems. The real-time note-taking assistant promises to streamline the documentation process for doctor visits, which can become burdensome for physicians, especially in high-volume facilities.

There are dozens of companies promising to do this administrative work without a human administrator. When health care providers can reliably find and implement these tools, Dr. Misasi says, the burden of charting on physicians could be lightened significantly.

“I think where AI stands to be a major win for physicians in terms of their workload is it could reduce the amount of time they spend entering data into boxes in the electronic medical record,” Dr. Misasi says. “AI is the way the medical record system will adapt to how humans are actually doing the work. So rather than the human having to abstract all the data and insert into fields in the chart, AI can take a natural conversation between a physician and a patient and do all the abstracting work necessary and all the data entry.”

Dr. Gangadhar agreed that much of the manual charting doctors have historically been tasked with is assumable by AI. He noted that prior authorizations, predeterminations, and a whole host of other paperwork that consumes physicians and their staff’s time could be automated over the coming years. With the physician shortage projected to worsen over the next decade, AI could be a tool that doctors use to cope.

“AI will allow physicians to be able to spend more of their time doing those things which they enjoy doing and need to do, which is face-to face human interaction,” Dr. Gangadhar says. “AI will mitigate the physician shortage. It may not eliminate it, but it will reduce the burden. I think it will reduce burnout, and it will bring the joy of practice back into doctors’ lives.”

Shaping the Future of Care

With norm-bending technologies powered by AI consistently entering the field of medicine, tomorrow’s doctors and providers need to be familiar with their strengths and limitations. In this landscape, it is imperative to include AI education in medical schools.

“To have AI tools at your disposal, bedside, will allow you to quickly refresh your memory or regain information about a disease process that you perhaps studied two years ago in medical school but now you have a patient sitting in front of you. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could pull up everything you need to know about that patient or that disease process right on your phone or right in front of you?” Dr. Gangadhar says. “Or wouldn’t it be wonderful if our medical students can plug in the presenting symptoms of a patient and have a device give you a differential diagnosis so then you can have a good starting point?”

While these concepts may seem far off, they hold significant near-term potential. With the right AI-powered tools, a physician could quickly and easily compare their approach for a patient against that patient’s complete medical history, assessing how it aligns with or differs from treatments used for similar patients who achieved positive outcomes.

AI excels at making predictions, but there is no anticipating all the ways technologies like these will impact medical practices.

One certainty, Dr. Gangadhar says, is that future physicians’ lives will be “dominated” by the integration of AI tools, and without a foundational level of understanding they will be a step or two behind. At KHSU, all students are exposed to medical AI in six sessions of Clinical Informatics, two of which focus specifically on ethical implications of AI in medicine.

“AI is going to change all our lives, not just in the field of medicine, but in everything we do,” Dr. Gangadhar says. “Medicine has been slow to incorporate some things, and I think we’re at a point where we can no longer wait. The technology’s here, and we’re going to have to adapt.”

Philanthropic Priorities

  • Tools such as AI are/will revolutionize health care.
  • Future physicians must embrace and use these tools to best care for patients.
  • Use of such tools can be part of the solution for the physician shortage as providers are able to work at the top of licensure, reserving more predictive tasks.