For better and for worse, artificially intelligent communication is inexorably making its way into medical care. How will this affect the doctor-patient relationship? Can AI convey human empathy and emotion? What will the impact be on your health? According to Dr. Jon Reisman, there’s no turning back. Listen, and learn what the future will hold.
Chapter 1: What insights does John Reisman share about AI's impact on doctors?
So, I would say it was that sort of mimicking of humanity side that really caught me off guard as it did many other people.
So you expected the technical side to be excellent, diagnosing complex diseases and offering evidence-based treatment plans, but you were surprised by the communication side.
Correct.
In one study, Chad GPT's answers to patient questions were rated as both more empathetic and of higher quality than those written by actual doctors. How is that possible? AI is not caring or empathetic.
Right, and I'm sorry to say perhaps many doctors are not either. I think a lot goes into what people perceive as an empathetic answer from a doctor. For instance, ChatGPT can generate language at a much quicker rate than a human.
If a human doctor is slowly typing into their computer an answer or just speaking the answer, it takes some time to come up with that answer, as where ChatGPT can kind of generate a large chunk of text in an instant, seemingly. I thought about this a lot. And I think what goes into feeling that a doctor's answer is empathetic, part of it might just be the length of the answer alone.
Obviously, that's not the only thing. But if a doctor says something short and blunt, like, oh, you're fine, don't worry about it. Maybe from a doctor's perspective, we think that sounds authoritative, and it sounds reassuring to a patient. But in reality, it sounds like
You're treating the patient like they can't handle the more details, they can't handle a more in-depth dive into what the technicalities of your decision are. And so perhaps we think that's reassuring, but I think a patient wants more information and wants to be a part of the decision, too, and not just take our word for it, as they might have in decades past when medicine was more paternalistic.
So I think just the length alone and the instant it takes for ChatGPT to generate a more in-depth, more explanatory explanation of what we think is going on and how the advice we're giving stems from that. I think that's a big part of it too. So I don't think that's the whole story, but perhaps that's a big part of it.
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Chapter 2: Can AI really mimic human empathy and bedside manner?
And sadly, for some people, that might be the bulk of their social interactions in daily life. But hopefully humans can compensate for the kind of dehumanizing of more and more aspects of our lives by kind of ramping up the humanity of other parts. I guess we haven't done that super well lately, but hopefully we will.
Hopefully we will. John, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?
The first takeaway I'd say is that as much as medicine feels like a very human endeavor, much of it is really just technical and a matter of customer service. And I think AI is going to do splendidly at that side. The second takeaway I would say is that there's really no going back. There's only going through and going forward.
And that applies to the way technology will affect healthcare and many other aspects of life. My third takeaway is that health care really needs to get into the 21st century in the way that it delivers care and interacts with patients. As many people have noticed, interacting with your doctor's office can be rather dreadful.
You have to sit in traffic, wait in the waiting room, get herded through your visit like an animal. And the communication can be terrible. You can wait for a callback for days and weeks or the results from your exams. And this all seems kind of stuck in the 20th or even the 19th century in some ways.
So while the technical side of medicine seems to be sprinting into the 21st century, the kind of customer service side of health care still seems rather dreadful and in need of updating quite dramatically.
Thank you, John. This has been really interesting. And thank you for your work to bring medicine into the 21st century.
Thank you so much, Lynn. It's been a pleasure.
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