Doctors: Patients Don’t Want You to Use AI

New survey shows patients will avoid doctors who use AI, considering them less trustworthy, skilled, and empathetic.

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There’s a deep divide between how patients and doctors view the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Doctors are overwhelmingly in favor of using AI: two-thirds of doctors have already incorporated it into their practice. But patients are concerned about AI’s tendency to make up false information and fear AI use may further reduce an already dismissive and unsympathetic medical interaction to something completely robotic.

This divide exists in other fields too, where corporate executives believe that AI has improved customer service, but actual customers disagree, with 88% preferring human interaction, and almost half say “their biggest frustration has been not being able to reach a human.”

Now, a new study illuminates that divide, demonstrating that patients don’t trust doctors who use AI. They think they’re less empathetic—and less good at their jobs. And given those beliefs, is it any surprise that patients also reported being less likely to make appointments with such doctors?

The study was conducted by Moritz Reis, Florian Reis, and Wilfried Kunde at the University of Wuerzburg and Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, and was published in JAMA Network Open.

According to the researchers, “Potential reasons for existing skepticism may include concerns that physicians rely too much on AI and that the use of AI could reduce patient-physician interactions as well as concerns about data protection and rising health care costs.”

A woman wearing white in the medical field looks at an AI chatbot on a laptop computer

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Peter Simons
Peter Simons was an academic researcher in psychology. Now, as a science writer, he tries to provide the layperson with a view into the sometimes inscrutable world of psychiatric research. As an editor for blogs and personal stories at Mad in America, he prizes the accounts of those with lived experience of the psychiatric system and shares alternatives to the biomedical model.

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