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Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Deliver on Its Promise in Health Care?

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Written by Robert M. Wachter, Erik Brynjolfsson

Category: none

Article Section: Application Development and Deployment

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Publication Date: 2023-11-30

SEO Description: Explore genAI’s transformative potential and challenges in healthcare, overcoming the productivity paradox and fostering digital growth

Wachter, Robert M., and Erik Brynjolfsson. “Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Deliver on Its Promise in Health Care?” JAMA, Nov. 2023, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.25054.

Keywords

Generative AI, Healthcare, Productivity paradox, Digital transformation, AI implementation

AI-Generated Paper Summary

Generated by Ethical AI Researcher GPT

The JAMA article titled “Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Deliver on Its Promise in Health Care?” by Robert M. Wachter, MD, and Erik Brynjolfsson, PhD, provides a comprehensive analysis of the potential and challenges that generative artificial intelligence (genAI) faces in transforming the healthcare industry. The paper begins by expressing both enthusiasm and skepticism towards genAI technologies like ChatGPT, noting the productivity paradox where promising new technologies often take years to live up to their potential in improving productivity. The authors reference the paradox’s historical context, considering whether genAI can overcome the typical delay through technology advancement and healthcare’s readiness to adapt to complementary innovations.

Author Caliber: The authors are highly credible in their fields of study. Robert M. Wachter, MD is from the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Erik Brynjolfsson, PhD, is associated with Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab and Institute for Human-Centered AI. Their affiliations with prestigious institutions add considerable weight to their insights on the intersection of genAI and healthcare.

Novelty & Merit:

  1. The paper addresses the “productivity paradox” in the context of genAI, bringing a historical analysis to understand the lag between technology implementation and productivity gains.
  2. It provides unique insights into how the healthcare ecosystem could adapt to genAI, highlighting recent evolution and potential readiness to adopt such technology.
  3. The article contrasts genAI with previous technology adoptions in healthcare, offering lessons from the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) and earlier attempts at healthcare AI.

Commercial Applications:

  1. Application of genAI in reducing healthcare costs and improving quality, efficiency, and equity in patient experience.
  2. Use of genAI for improving the adoption rates and effectiveness of EHRs.
  3. Adoption of genAI technologies by healthcare organizations to innovate their cultures, leadership, workforce, and workflows.

Findings and Conclusions:

  1. There is a potential for genAI to improve healthcare rapidly, provided that technology iteration is swift and healthcare organizations are able to implement the necessary complementary changes.
  2. Previous challenges with technology adoption, like with EHRs, could offer lessons for successfully integrating genAI into healthcare.
  3. The healthcare industry’s current context, including recent advancements and receptivity to change, may expedite the productive application of genAI.

Author’s Abstract

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has elicited enormous enthusiasm and serious concerns.History has shown that general purpose technologies often fail to deliver their promised benefits for many years (“the productivity paradox of information technology”). Health care has several attributes that make the successful deployment of new technologies even more difficult than in other industries; these have challenged prior efforts to implement AI and electronic health records. However, genAI has unique properties that may shorten the usual lag between implementation and productivity and/or quality gains in health care. Moreover, the health care ecosystem has evolved to make it more receptive to genAI, and many health care organizations are poised to implement the complementary innovations in culture, leadership, workforce, and workflow often needed for digital innovations to flourish.The ability of genAI to rapidly improve and the capacity of organizations to implement complementary innovations that allow IT tools to reach their potential are more advanced than in the past; thus, genAI is capable of delivering meaningful improvements in health care more rapidly than was the case with previous technologies.

Read the full paper here

Last updated on December 10th, 2023.