This will make many of my physician colleagues very uncomfortable, but Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will play a dominant role in the practice of medicine, and it will happen much sooner than we think. The newest A.I models are improving rapidly by using mixed modes of data input to provide accurate diagnoses and treatment options. Already, many of my physician friends regularly use ChatGPT, Claude or Grok to look up facts, diagnoses and treatment options. This A.I. assisted practice will soon be the norm, and it will be quickly followed by A.I. Agents that will directly interact with patients and provide them with health information, diagnostic triage, and treatment options without any providers being involved (which sounds very close to practicing medicine). Physicians may soon be left to simply press the “prescribe” or “refer” buttons as the “human in the loop”. This sounds both unrewarding and precarious as a profession that dates back to at least 4,000 B.C. In the next five years, physicians and other health care providers will need to completely redefine our role in the healthcare system.
Let’s unpack this thesis:
- Physicians’ power lies in our control of medical knowledge - Through all of recorded history, the role of physicians (and other healers) has been one of holding the sacred knowledge of healing, passing it from generation to generation, and applying it to alleviate the suffering of humankind. Whether using oral, written or digital communication systems, the process has remained largely the same. We hold the knowledge and impart it for the good of humanity (or some would say for the good of our pocketbook).
- Physicians were selected for our prodigious memories - While physicians like to think we were selected for our overall intellect, the medical education process selects for very specifically for memory skills. Medical school is a brute force memorization exercise. To make it through, physicians have to be in the top percentiles of memory ability. This selection has served us well in the past 200 years, but it sometimes comes at the expense of excluding other skills.
- A.I already outstrips human ability to recall facts - Unfortunately, the scale of medical knowledge has outstripped the ability of even the best physician brains, with new medical knowledge being generated in the Terabytes each year. And, for the first time in history, we now have tools that can take a human question, stated in the vernacular, and find the latest, greatest facts in seconds. Our ability to be only the “holders” of medical information has been lost for a long time, as those of us who contend with Dr Google have known for years.
- By 2026, A.I. will outstrip our ability to assimilate information - According to the CEOs of both Anthropic and OpenAI, Generative A.I. will achieve “superintelligence” by 2026 (their “conservative” estimate). By this they mean A.I. will have more capacity to learn and process knowledge than any human, and likely more than all humans combined. This means human physicians will then also abdicate their superior ability to coalesce and assimilate disparate information. In other words, we will have lost our position as both the “holder” and “purveyor” of medical information. Let that sink in!
Although we may not like these conclusions, it does not change the facts. Physicians need to begin to redefine our role in the healthcare industry. Being the holder and purveyor of medical knowledge will no longer be enough to make us valuable to patients and society at large.
In my next article, I will discuss some of the ways physicians will need to evolve if we are to remain the valuable social resource we have been for the past 6,000 years.
