Health-care AI is here. We don’t know if it actually helps patients.

Health-care AI is here. We don’t know if it actually helps patients. The tools may be accurate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll improve health outcomes. I don’t need to tell you that AI is everywhere. Or that it is being used, increasingly, in hospitals. Doctors are using AI to help them with notetaking. AI-based tools are trawling through patient records, flagging people who may require certain support or treatments. They are also used to interpret medical exam results and X-rays. A growing number of studies suggest that many of these tools can deliver accurate results. But there’s a bigger question here: Does using them actually translate into better health outcomes for patients? We don’t yet have a good answer. That’s what Jenna Wiens, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, and Anna Goldenberg of the University of Toronto, argue in a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine this week. Wiens tells me she has spent years investigating how AI might benefit health care. For the first decade of her career she tried to pitch the technology to clinicians. Over the last few years, she says, it’s as though “a switch flipped.” Health-care providers not only appear much more interested in the promise of these technologies, they have also begun rapidly deploying them. The problem is that many providers aren’t rigorously assessing how well they actually work. Take “ambient AI” tools, for example. Also known as AI scribes, they “listen” to conversations between doctors and patients, then transcribe and summarize them. Multiple tools are available, and they are already being widely adopted by health-care providers. A few months ago, a staffer at a major New York medical center who develops AI tools for doctors told me that, anecdotally, medics are “overjoyed” by the technology—it allows them to focus all their attention on their patients during appointments, and it saves them from a lot of time-consuming paperwork. Early studies support these anecdotes and suggest that the tools can reduce clinician burnout. That’s all well and good. But what about patient health outcomes? “[Researchers] have evaluated provider or clinician and patient satisfaction, but not really how these tools are affecting clinical decision-making,” says Wiens. “We just don’t know.” The same holds true for other AI-based technologies used in health-care settings. Some are used to predict patients’ health trajectories, others to recommend treatments. They are designed to make health care more effective and efficient. But even a tool that is “accurate” won’t necessarily improve health outcomes. AI might speed up the interpretation of a chest X-ray, for example. But how much will a doctor rely on its analysis? How will that tool affect the way a doctor interacts with patients or recommends treatment? And ultimately: What will this mean for those patients? The answers to those questions might vary between hospitals or departments and could depend on clinical workflows, says Wiens. They might also differ between doctors at various stages of their careers. Take the AI scribes, as another example. Some…