Doctors are drowning in paperwork. Some companies claim AI can help
When Dereck Paul was training as a doctor at the University of California San Francisco, he couldn't believe how outdated the hospital's records-keeping was. The computer systems looked like they'd time-traveled from the 1990s, and many of the medical records were still kept on paper.
"I was just totally shocked by how analog things were," Paul recalls.
The experience inspired Paul to found a small San Francisco-based startup called Glass Health. Glass Health is now among a handful of companies who are hoping to use artificial intelligence chatbots to offer services to doctors. These firms maintain that their programs could dramatically reduce the paperwork burden physicians face in their daily lives, and dramatically improve the patient-doctor relationship.
"We need these folks not in burnt-out states, trying to complete documentation," Paul says. "Patients need more than 10 minutes with their doctors."
But some independent researchers fear a rush to incorporate the latest AI technology into medicine could lead to errors and biased outcomes that might harm patients.
"I think it's very exciting, but I'm also super, a professor of artificial medical intelligence at University College London in the United Kingdom. "Anything that involves decision-making about a patient's care is something that has to be treated with extreme caution for the time being."
