The Good Ways to Use AI in Medical Care
Medical technology has to improve more
In today’s society, there are a lot of AI or smart technologies in our daily lives and many kinds of industries. Especially, many people believe the best efficient use of AI is for medical care. The reason is that lack of doctors and hospitals is one of the biggest problems in the medical industry. To explain, the population is growing rapidly around the world, especially in many developing countries, so we need more facilities for health care. In addition, decreasing of birth rates in some developed countries like some European countries, the U.S. and some Asian countries including Japan causes the lack of workers. Therefore, AI, which does not feel tired and can be smart by deep learning is a key to solve this issue in the medical care because it allows doctors to save time or energy and reduce burnout or burden. However, AI involved in making decisions for treatment plans and collecting or managing huge amount of personal information of patients in the medical industry should be regulated to use it effectively. To be specific, people have to use it as just a tool and improve the security system.
Firstly, smart technology for medical care should be controlled by human. In other words, doctors should not rely on technology too much. I agree with Robert David Hart who is a London-based journalist and researcher. He mentions that it is unclear whether doctors can take on the responsibility about AI algorithms’ mistakes through making decisions in an article “When artificial intelligence botches your medical diagnosis, who’s to blame?”(Hart, 2017, para. 6). It is the most difficult issue to answer in this topic. In fact, IBM’s Watson supercomputer is used to make decisions for cancer patients’ treatment plans today. However, it is not perfect to choose proper plans; it sometime makes mistakes, such as a wrong diagnosis of the disease. Usually, doctors or hospitals have to be blamed when they make mistakes. However, I wonder that doctors should be blamed due to AI’s errors. It is impossible to understand how or why AI algorithm make decisions because of “black box”, which is a problem caused by the difference of level of thinking ability between human and AI. Therefore, we have to consider about controlling technology to reduce AI’s mistakes instead of thinking about who takes on the responsibility. In reality, the number of death because of technology errors is including around the world. According to CNBC news “The third-leading cause of death in US most doctors don’t want you to know about”, the mistake of AI’s decision-making in the healthcare industry is third-leading cause of death in the U.S., and 440,000 people are killed by medical errors every year in the country (CNBC, 2018, para. 5&6). People have to pay attention to this frightening situation more and think about how we can reduce this number. Of course, doctors sometimes make mistakes related to patients’ death as well. However, they are available to bear the blame legally by explaining why the mistake was occurred in a court, and patients or their families can also seek reparations to doctors or hospitals. In this way, doctors can gain trust of patients. On the other hand, is it possible to be blamed for AI instead of human? Can most people trust treatments using smart technology in their medical treatment? Therefore, it is the most important thing for doctors to use AI as just a tool for helping decision-making and to make conclusive decisions based on the treatment policies and their experiences in order to receive medical treatments with easy minds for all patients.
Secondly, the management system should be strengthened in the medical industry to be comfortable for all patients. In an article of “BC Physician Privacy Toolkit” by the British Columbia Medical Association, it shows that a Canadian Medical Association found “11% of the public withheld information from a health care provider due to concerns about whom it would be shared with or what purposes it would be used for” (BCMA, 2017, p.6/ para. 3). Some people may say that 11% is a small number. However, personal health information, which encompasses patients’ lifetime is one of the most sensitive information to manage, and all patients have a right to determine where or how it is shared. Therefore, the number of people who concern about wrongful releasing of individual’s data that damages themselves should be very close to zero. Moreover, safe and successful managing the information is related to build good relationships between physicians and patients. For these reasons, the security system should be improved more in order to reassure all patients. Currently, many solutions of this problem come up. For instance, one of them is Google Deepmind, which is a AI can transfer and update a large amount of patient’s medical records fast, easily and safely. According to “DeepMind Health and data” in the website of Deepmind, “[T]he data is stored in an encrypted database and only decrypted when it is needed for processing. The decrypted data, and data derived from it, is never stored on disk without first being re-encrypted” (Deepmind, 2019, para. 16). This AI is important to make a strong management system in the healthcare. However, it should be improved more to ease all patients’ worry because the number of healthcare records hacking incidents keep growing every year. In the real situation, it is possible to break into medical institution’s networks by using a type of malware known as ransomware for hackers even they are locked or encrypted. In fact, the recent study by the American Medical Association shows that “The number of annual health data breaches increased 70% to 344 over the past seven years” (Tindera, 2018, para. 2). Personal medical information is very valuable because hackers can get many kinds of individual’s data like identification, finance and health at the same time. Thus, what must be done is finding effective ways to avoid hackings and cyber attacks to personal healthcare information.
To sum up, what people have to do in order to use smart technology effectively are to think about them as tools and to make a strong security for patients’ health records. In other words, doctors have to examine their patients by using their real experiences through choosing treatment plans or diagnosing illnesses: they should not rely on high technology too much. Furthermore, the security system of medical records should be improved to avoid releasing information by hackers. I think the biggest key point to solve the issue of AI is human control technology; we should not be controlled by technology that human made. I hope we will coexist with technology in the future.
