Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming every part of our daily lives whether or not we notice it. I want to talk about an area that we haven’t really touched on much on the show: AI is revolutionizing the medical field. Doctors and nurse practitioners can use AI to prescribe the perfect dosage of medicine based on your genetic makeup. Here are a few pros and cons of using this technology in our health care system.

Pros

Let’s face it, doctors are busy. The last time I went for a checkup, I got like four minutes, six max. The first pro of AI in health care is that it can save you and your doctor time. 

• If you happen to have a super rare syndrome, the doctor has to look it up, and it takes time. By relying on genetic databases and algorithms, AI can also diagnose patients with illnesses even if they are super rare. And a program can diagnose it much quicker than a doctor can. 
• This also would minimize burnout on nursing and medical staff. We all want that! We don’t want a doctor to not sleep for 16 hours and then operate on us. 

Cons

Now there’s always pros and cons when it comes to things like this. 

• First, a genetic database could come with tons of privacy risks. One of the recent examples that I came out was with a company that manages electronic health records for doctors. It left thousands of patients’ lab results and history exposed when one of its Microsoft servers allegedly was not protected by any passwords. Go figure. So your information from your Social Security number to where you live to your whole family history could be exposed, and nobody wants that. 
• The other shortfall I would say is that AI can only reliably look at existing information. So if a disease is new or super rare, it may not be diagnosed correctly.

Can you think of any more pros and cons of artificial intelligence in health care? Let us know in the comments.