The aging of the U.S. population and the extent to which multiple morbidities characterize a large segment of that sub-group provides assurance that the health care industry will continue to be robust for decades to come. What is unknown is the degree to which developments in artificial intelligence and robotics will have an impact on the health workforce and on the patients who obtain health care services. If efforts continue to develop driverless automobiles and trucks, it seems obvious that employment of humans to operate these vehicles will undergo a gradual disappearance in the taxi industry, to cite just one example. As jobs disappear in one line of work, it is uncertain how many new kinds of jobs will be created and whether individuals who are so displaced will find jobs in other aspects of the economy.
That question has relevance for the health field. As noted in the May/June 2018 issue of The Hastings Center Report, although medicine is particularly recalcitrant to change, applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care have professionals in fields like radiology worried about the future of their careers and have the public tittering about the prospect of soulless machines making life‐and‐death decisions. Medicine thus appears to be at an inflection point—a kind of Groundhog Day on which either AI will bring a springtime of improved diagnostic and predictive practices or the shadow of public and professional fear will lead to six more metaphorical weeks of winter in medical AI. The article points out that for decades, psychologists and decision scientists have argued that simple algorithms for specific diagnostic and prediction tasks often outperform clinicians. Despite robust evidence of this effect, professionals routinely overestimate their ability to carry out such tasks and underestimate the value of actuarial methods for making health care decisions. In the hospital setting, routine tasks that involve making beds, delivering food to patients, and perhaps even measuring blood pressure could be done by robots that do not complain, take sick days, or dislike working on weekends. Efforts to enhance the bottom line will be one of the key factors that help to dictate how many human functions in health care will be replaced by machines as the future unfolds.
Other Articles from TRENDS June 2018
WORDS AND THEIR PLACEMENT REALLY MATTER
Apart from gestures and semiotic influences, such as wearing a white coat and having a stethoscope, communication between a health professional and a patient relies heavily on language in the form of words—whether spoken or written. Read More
FUNDING AND AGENCY RESTRUCTURING
The House Appropriations Committee in June 2018 released the text of its fiscal year (FY) 2019 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education funding bill. The proposed legislation...Read More
DEVELOPMENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Two issues in higher education attracted a considerable amount of attention in June 2018. The newest is an announcement by the Trump Administration to merge the Departments of Labor and Education into a single Department of Education and the Workforce...Read More
AVAILABLE RESOURCES ACCESSIBLE ELECTRONICALLY
- Academic Medical Centers And High-Need, High-Cost Patients: A Call To Action
- Youth Risk Behavior Survey Results And Trends Report
- New America’s Survey On Higher Education
PRESIDENT’S CORNER — ASAHP MEMBER FOCUS
Name and Title: Kim L. Halula, PhD, Associate Dean, College of Health Sciences... Read More
AFFORDABLE CARE ACT DEVELOPMENTS
Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) become law in 2010, Congressional Republicans have vowed to repeal and replace it. With the advent...Read More
QUICK STAT (SHORT, TIMELY, AND TOPICAL)
Genetic testing and spending on that testing have grown rapidly since the mapping of the human genome in 2003, but it is not widely known how many tests there are, how they are used, and how paid for...Read More
HEALTH TECHNOLOGY CORNER
The results of a study published on April 18, 2018 in the open access journal npj Digital Medicine is based on an evaluation of the effectiveness of using Twitter to search for individuals who become lost due to dementia...Read More
THE WALKING CORPSE SYNDROME
Page one of this issue of TRENDS is on the topic of communication as expressed by the use of words. An error made in speaking can be referred to as...Read More