As technology advances, it opens the door to innovation. One of the biggest industries to benefit from emerging technologies is the healthcare industry. Through advanced tech, healthcare workers and providers have been able to give better care to patients, limit human error through ​​electronic health records, make healthcare more available to patients in rural areas, and lower overall costs. 

An advanced technology known as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is aiming to make large improvements in medical training. AI could be incorporated into physician training and help them be better prepared for their future in the medical field. 

​​Shift Training Knowledge

Before the introduction of AI in the healthcare industry, doctors and physicians held all of the information they needed to diagnose patients and decide on the correct path of care in their minds on hand-held records. The patient’s outcome depended on how much knowledge and experience the doctor had. Now training and education will need to shift from training providers to know all of the data, to now assisting them to understand how to extract essential information from the massive amounts of data.

AI makes huge amounts of data available at physicians’ fingertips, making it imperative for students to learn not to keep up with data because the algorithm can do that. Students will need to develop the ability to know what’s useful to know and what is not. 

New Probabilities and Methods

As AI becomes more involved in healthcare, students will need to start learning the probabilities and the methods used in AI. With more data and better pattern recognition software, healthcare providers may spend less gathering information and more time focusing on patient care. In other words, medical students and future physicians may evolve to change their focus from hunting and synthesizing data, to using AI to help them interpret results and then emphasizing compassion for their patients.

Physicians should be able to think less clinically and more compassionately, which can have a massive impact on the quality of patient care. 

Knowing When to Question AI Data

While AI is an advanced technology that can greatly limit human error, it’s imperative that students learn when to question it. When training future physicians, there needs to be an emphasis on understanding AI output while also questioning AI methodologies. 

Although AI will assist in spending less time gathering information, it’s good to have a healthy scepticism. A certain level of scepticism will help to avoid oversight and automation bias. Students must learn to identify potential flaws or errors as AI grows and evolves. For all of its benefits, nothing can get a professional (in any field) experience. Not brilliance, not AI, it’s simply time in the profession, developing their own pattern recognition and developing an experienced “gut feel” to check and back up the output from AI