Healthcare has a promising new assistant

It might be time to move beyond the question of whether androids dream of electric sheep and ask what generative AI dreams of.

It’s made its presence felt in every field one can think of, including medicine and healthcare.

While generative AI is also engaged in assignments less fanciful but still significant, such as streamlining time-consuming administrative tasks through models trained on healthcare-specific prose, early adopters have begun taking the tech out for a test drive across healthcare verticals, including patient care.

Even as they play out in real time, the concerns with these efforts predictably revolve around privacy and security.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

That said, while six in 10 say they’d be “uncomfortable” if their own healthcare provider relied on AI for diagnoses and treatments, there are more Americans who think the use of the tech would reduce mistakes made by healthcare providers rather than increase them.

And I get the thinking behind these stats. ChatGPT has developed quite the reputation for making up everything from research and citations. In technical yet layman terms, it has a tendency to “hallucinate.”

You don’t want your health decisions to be dependent on something out of … thin air, even if the doctor’s new assistant has better bedside manners than the good doc.

But some experiments could potentially lead to groundbreaking breakthroughs.

For instance, some drug makers have already started using AI to design new medicines, including one for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare lung disease. The makers say using generative AI to design new drugs helps cut down time for medicine development.

Another example comes from the University of Texas, where researchers are studying how to use generative AI to better personalize cancer treatments. (Millionaire philanthropists of the world, give their ilk your money.)

Concerns aside, I can see ChatMD becoming equivalent to WebMD for those of us who like to torture ourselves by Googling symptoms.

Firms like Google and Microsoft have been testing out generative AI for different healthcare needs for a minute now, but I think it’s safe to say that even those a little late to the game can cash in if they find a cozy, specialized niche for themselves.

That said, I sure can get behind the idea of syncing generative AI and wearable devices to make sense of data from the latter.