AI physicians – The Health Care Blog

Who Needs Humans, Anyway?

Jun 5, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

Imagine my excitement when I saw the headline: “Robot doctors at world’s first AI hospital can treat 3,000 a day.” Finally, I thought – now we’re getting somewhere. I must admit that my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered to find that the patients were virtual. But, still.

The article was in Interesting Engineering, and it largely covered the source story in Global Times, which interviewed the research team leader Yang Liu, a professor at China’s Tsinghua University, where he is executive dean of Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) and associate dean of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. The professor and his team just published a paper detailing their efforts.

The paper describes what they did: “we introduce a simulacrum of hospital called Agent Hospital that simulates the entire process of treating illness. All patients, nurses, and doctors are autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs).” They modestly note: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first simulacrum of hospital, which comprehensively reflects the entire medical process with excellent scalability, making it a valuable platform for the study of medical LLMs/agents.”

In essence, “Resident Agents” randomly contract a disease, seek care at the Agent Hospital, where they are triaged and treated by Medical Professional Agents, who include 14 doctors and 4 nurses (that’s how you can tell this is only a simulacrum; in the real world, you’d be lucky to have 4 doctors and 14 nurses). The goal “is to enable a doctor agent to learn how to treat illness within the simulacrum.”

The Agent Hospital has been compared to the AI town developed at Stanford last year, which had 25 virtual residents living and socializing with each other. “We’ve demonstrated the ability to create general computational agents that can behave like humans in an open setting,” said Joon Sung Park, one of the creators. The Tsinghua researchers have created a “hospital town.”

Gosh, a healthcare system with no humans involved. It can’t be any worse than the human one. Then, again, let me know when the researchers include AI insurance company agents in the simulacrum; I want to see what bickering ensues.

Letting AI Physicians Into the Guild

Mar 14, 2023

BY KIM BELLARD

Let’s be honest: we’re going to have AI physicians.

Now, that prediction comes with a few caveats. It’s not going to be this year, and maybe not even in this decade. We may not call them “physicians,” but, rather, may think of them as a new category entirely. AI will almost certainly first follow its current path of become assistive technology, for human clinicians and even patients. We’re going to continue to struggle to fit them into existing regulatory boxes, like clinical decision support software or medical devices, until those boxes prove to be the wrong shape and size for how AI capabilities develop.

But, even given all that, we are going to end up with AI physicians. They’re going to be capable of listening to patients’ symptoms, of evaluating patient history and clinical indicators, and of both determining likely diagnosis and suggested treatments. With their robot underlings, or other smart devices, they’ll even be capable of performing many/most of those treatments.

We’re going to wonder how we ever got along without them.

Many people claim to not be ready for this. The Pew Research Center recently found that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable if their physician even relied on AI for their care, and were more worried that health care professionals would adopt AI technologies too fast rather than too slow.

Still, though, two-thirds of the respondents already admit that they’d want AI to be used in their skin cancer screening, and one has to believe that as more people understand the kinds of things AI is already assisting with, much less the things it will soon help with, the more open they’ll be.

People claim to value the patient-physician relationship, but what we really want is to be healthy. AI will be able to help us with that.