By Claudia Tanner
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As artificial intelligence becomes capable of taking on more complex medical tasks, health leaders are grappling with whether the technology could erode doctors’ skills – or make clinicians who learn to use it more valuable.
Dr Eric Poon, chief health information officer at Duke Health, raised the prospect of “deskilling” as AI advances from performing simple tasks to helping diagnose difficult cases.
“When the AI tools can start prompting clinicians not to just do simple things like order a mammogram for women over age 40, it can perhaps even diagnose difficult cases much more accurately at lower costs,” Poon said at Newsweek’s AI Health Summit in New York.
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“We have to think about what would happen to our clinicians at the bedside,” he said. “Would this lead to some kind of deskilling?”
The concern comes as a Harvard-led study earlier this year found that an advanced AI agent outperformed human doctors in a series of demanding tests that assess the ability to correctly diagnose patient illnesses.
OpenAI’s “o1-preview” demonstrated its ability to handle emergency-room triage scenarios, recommend diagnostic tests and manage clinical cases at a level that matched or surpassed well-trained physicians.
Poon said the question has implications for how future doctors are trained.
“What is our obligation as we prepare our next generation of clinicians?” Poon asked. “I want great clinicians to take care of me when I am old. So, how should we train the next generation?”
Poon said the issue becomes more important as clinicians grow increasingly dependent on technology and AI.
“When the AI is not there, everybody is uncomfortable,” he said. “Part of our jobs … is thinking about not only how they use the new technology responsibly … but what are the skills that we need to retain?”
Dr Nabil Chehade, chief clinical transformation, innovation and strategy officer at The MetroHealth System, said medicine has faced similar fears about new technology before.
A surgeon, Chehade recalled worrying that younger doctors trained in laparoscopic and robotic surgery would lack the traditional skills needed to respond to complications. “They don't know how to open the abdomen,” he said. “How are they going to fix it?” But over time, he said, the technology advanced to the point where many of those complications could be handled without reverting to open surgery.
“Guess what? Now, 15, 20 years later, they don’t need to open the belly,” Chehade said. “History repeats itself. We are smart enough, ultimately, to find solutions to these things, but we just have to be cognizantthat we need to work towards that.”
Theo Zanos, head of the Division of Health AI at Northwell Health, pushed back against the idea that AI will simply replace physicians.
He pointed to a prediction made a decade ago by AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton that radiologists would soon be displaced by the technology.
“We’ve heard exactly the same phrase 10 years ago,” he said. “Actually, today we are lacking radiologists more than ever.”
Instead, Zanos said doctors need to adapt: “A doctor that uses AI will replace a doctor that doesn’t use AI, not AI will replace doctors.”
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