OSF keynote speaker: Health care must preserve human connection amid AI
Key Takeaways:
- Healthleaders must ensure human connection remains central to the care they give, despite rapid advances in AI that can improve outcomes.
- Automating routine tasks can free clinicians to spend more time with patients and provide compassionate, personalized care.
- Regulation and thoughtful oversight are essential to minimize unintended consequences and ensure AI benefits patients and society.
As artificial intelligence (AI) advances toward capabilities that once seemed like science fiction, health care leaders face a critical question: How can technology help clinicians reach more people without sacrificing the human connections that make care meaningful?
Physician, entrepreneur, CEO of innovation company HealthLab and Microsoft Healthcare Innovation Lab founder Michael Gillam, MD, FACEP, was the keynote speaker this week at the Health Care Engineering Systems Symposium celebrating the Jump ARCHES program. His speech came during second half of the symposium, which represented the full Innovation Academic Incubator and academic partners that include Illinois State and Bradley Universities, as well as the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Illinois Chicago.
Dr. Gilliam’s presentation explores the accelerating pace of technological change, the potential for AI to transform health care and the importance of preserving compassion in an increasingly automated world.
Exponential growth brings extraordinary possibilities
Dr. Gillum says people often underestimate the exponential growth of artificial intelligence because they tend to think in linear terms.
“They’re doing art. They’re composing music. They’re creating videos because they’re taking all the progress and doubling it. And now all that progress and doubling it, and this doubling is occurring about every three months. Whatever has surprised us so far in some ways it’s … just wait, because what’s coming is going to be surprising,” he shares with a laugh following his presentation.
Improvements in computing power and declining costs, he says, could produce breakthroughs in health care that are difficult to anticipate using conventional assumptions.
Computers, Dr. Gillam argues, will eventually match the computational capacity of the human brain, and digital intelligence could become vastly more powerful in the coming decades. He also describes the technological singularity, a theoretical point at which technological progress becomes so rapid that its consequences are difficult to predict.
AI and advances in computing, Dr. Gilliam believes, could help address one of health care’s greatest challenges: the enormous gap between the number of people who need medical care and the number who can access it. He cites an estimate that two billion people worldwide may never see a physician, clinician or nurse during their lifetime, despite the growing availability of mobile technology.
But expanding access is only part of the equation. Gillam emphasizes that technology must support, rather than replace, the human relationships at the heart of health care.
“The thing that will become increasingly important, is humanity, connection, the human touch, the thing that it seems like so many of our youth, teenagers and others crave today.” (:20)
Automating routine work while protecting compassion
Dr. Gillum's vision for AI centers on freeing health care professionals from repetitive administrative and operational tasks so they can spend more time with patients.
“We want to automate the routine and humanize the exceptional,” he suggests.
The principle reflects a distinction between the tasks technology can help perform and the deeply personal experiences that define health care. People could be navigating chemotherapy while raising children, returning to work after losing a child or caring for a loved one with dementia. In those circumstances, compassionate care requires more than clinical knowledge or efficient processes.
And he recognizes computational capacity alone does not mean a machine can replicate human intelligence or consciousness. Nevertheless, he believes that the underlying pace of technological development demands serious attention from health care institutions.
To drive home his point, Dr. Gillam points out the internet was designed to bring people together and to allow for global connections and to build community. Instead, it’s been a source that has also divided people with misinformation.
Without guardrails, Dr. Gillam thinks AI could have negative unintended consequences.
“We’re at this sort of juncture right now where it’s unclear where the world is going to go and so this is going to another one of the great challenges and questions we’ll have, ‘How do we steer these so things turn out better?’”
Those guardrails should take the form of regulation. He doesn’t believe the AI companies really want laws regulating what they do. But Dr. Gillam poses the question - what would happen if we asked Big Pharma and chemical companies to regulate themselves?