Medical Jobs that AI is Unlikely to Eliminate

My news sources (you can’t just say “the news” anymore, since everyone can choose what angle/bias/viewpoint/political spin they want to believe) are predicting that AI will very quickly replace midlevel professionals. Even in healthcare, areas like radiology seem to be pretty vulnerable to the advancing non-human capabilities.

In my practice I see many elderly people who are unable to use technology to interact with professionals outside their own homes. House calls are appreciated by patients and caregivers and give me as a physician a clearer picture of what my patients lives are like. And I hear every day how people have qualified for in-home help but the agencies don’t have enough staff to provide it. So I believe home health nurses and home health aides can feel fairly secure for quite a while.

And even if a doctor sees a patient in an office setting, getting a clear medical history is something not easily automated because of the way older people communicate and describe things. And when it comes to communicating a diagnosis and treatment options while also exploring each patient’s ultimate life goals seems nearly impossible to entrust to AI in my view. And the more diagnoses a patient has, the more judgment calls need to be made about where to set the priority, because what the patient primarily wants may not be exactly what the treatment algorithms would suggest.

There are many interesting examples in the literature of how two different doctors can prescribe the same medication and get totally different outcomes. This boils down to the personality and style of the doctor. Maybe you could teach AI what usually works, but patients need to see the face and know the name of their provider and it would be dishonest and immoral to make up fake names for AI “doctors“ communicating with patients.

As a side issue, liability in medicine has been a big concern, and I just read in my newsfeed today that in some places manufacturers of driverless cars will be held liable for traffic violations and presumably personal injury cases. I don’t believe the issue of liability with AI involvement in patient care is anywhere near settled.