The American Medical Association (AMA) has passed a policy addressing "augmented intelligence"—and not "artificial intelligence"—that provides recommendations for stakeholders' concerns.
The growing interest in artificial intelligence from healthcare stakeholders has raised concerns regarding the design, implementation and use of these new technologies.
“As technology continues to advance and evolve, we have a unique opportunity to ensure that augmented intelligence is used to benefit patients, physicians, and the broad health care community,” said AMA Board Member Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH. “Combining augmented intelligence methods and systems with an irreplaceable human clinician can advance the delivery of care in a way that outperforms what either can do alone. But we must forthrightly address challenges in the design, evaluation and implementation as this technology is increasingly integrated into physicians’ delivery of care to patients.”
The AMA policy included the following:
- Improve patient outcomes and physician satisfaction by leveraging engagement in digital health and other priority areas.
- Identify opportunities to integrate the perspective of practicing physicians into the development, design, validation and implementation of healthcare augmented intelligence.
- Promote the development of high-quality, clinically validated healthcare augmented intelligence that is designed and evaluated in keeping with best practices in user-centered design, transparent, capable of being reproduced, identifies steps to address bias and avoid introducing or exacerbating healthcare disparities and ensure patients’ privacy and security of personal information.
- Improve the understanding on benefits and limitations of healthcare augmented intelligence by educating patients, physicians, medical students and health administrators.
- Evaluate the legal implications of healthcare augmented intelligence, including liability issues or intellectual property.
“To reap the benefits for patient care, physicians must have the skills to work comfortably with health care augmented intelligence. Just as working effectively with EHRs is now part of training for medical students and residents, educating physicians to work effectively with augmented intelligence systems, or more narrowly, the augmented intelligence algorithms that can inform clinical care decisions, will be critical to the future of augmented intelligence in healthcare,” Ehrenfeld said.
Cara joined TriMed Media in 2016 and is currently a Senior Writer for Clinical Innovation & Technology. Originating from Detroit, Michigan, she holds a Bachelors in Health Communications from Grand Valley State University.