AI could help with things like providing diagnoses for certain medical conditions or supplementing the work of health organizations, according to panelists who spoke at the in-person, livestreamed event, held April 30 in the Harvard Chan Studio. But it could also provide biased information, or be used to push misinformation, they said.

Speakers included Andy Beam, assistant professor of epidemiology and deputy at Harvard Chan School editor of NEJM AI; Lucila Ohno-Machado, deputy dean for biomedical informatics and chair of biomedical informatics and data science at the Yale University School of Medicine; and Milind Tambe, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University, and principal scientist and director of “AI for Social Good” at Google Research. Carey Goldberg—science, health, and medicine reporter and co-author of “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond”—was moderator.

On the plus side, AI can provide medical expertise for people who lack access, said Beam. “If you live in rural parts of the country and your nearest physician is three hours away, you can at least get access to a facsimile [of medical expertise] quickly, cheaply, and easily,” he said.

AI may also help speed up diagnoses in the mental health arena, Beam added. For instance, he said, “A person with type 1 bipolar disorder, on average, is undiagnosed for seven years. That can be a very rocky seven-year period. It can manifest to the [person’s] family as [something like] substance abuse, and there’s no clear indication of what’s going on.” Access to AI may lead to a quicker diagnosis and improve quality of the life for the person with that condition, Beam said.

He noted that there have been documented cases of people on “medical odysseys”—those who’ve struggled for years to find a diagnosis for a mysterious medical ailment—who found what they were looking for thanks to AI.

Tambe said that AI can be beneficial in the mobile health arena. For example, a nonprofit he works with in India called ARMMAN runs a mobile health program that delivers automated messages to pregnant women and new mothers, such as reminders to take iron or calcium supplements. AI has been able to help the organization determine which women to focus their interventions on, he said. Tambe also noted that an organization hoping to increase uptake of vaccines might be able to use AI to help determine how best to do so, such as by recommending who to target for interventions like travel vouchers or reminders.

While AI can provide efficiencies, Tambe cautioned that he wouldn’t want it to be used “in a way that eliminates the human touch where it’s absolutely needed.”

Source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/how-artificial-intelligence-might-help-health-care-or-harm-it/