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A major new study found AI outperformed doctors in ER diagnosis — but there’s a catch

An Open AI model posted impressive results in emergency care. But we still need human doctors.

When I think of heroic doctors, I think of the physician in the hospital who’s presented with a patient suffering bizarre or vague symptoms and pulls out the right diagnosis just in time. It’s the basis of almost every medical procedural TV show, from House, MD to The Pitt. It’s the mystique that has made doctors among the most revered professionals in society.

But what if a machine could make that call just as well or even better? What should we do about it here in the real world?

That question is becoming more urgent. According to a major new study published in Science, advanced artificial intelligence programs often outperform human doctors when diagnosing people seeking emergency medical care.

AI has already, for better or worse, become a part of modern medicine. Different programs are being used to do everything from collate physician notes to identify promising new candidates for drug development. The authors of the Science study portrayed their findings as strong evidence that AI could be valuable in the emergency room as well — as long as it is fully vetted in clinical trials for specific uses.

Lest the hype outpace the science, the authors made a point to say that they feared their research would be cited to justify replacing human doctors with software programs: “I get a little bit queasy about how some of these results might be used,” said co-author Dr. Adam Rodman, a general internis­­­t and medical educator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. They warned against taking such a simplistic view of their findings.

”No one should look at this and say we do not need doctors,” Rodman said in a call with reporters.

At the same time, the researchers did argue that AI had reached the point where it could be a genuine asset for doctors in certain situations — especially in the ER, where physicians are frequently dealing with imperfect information. They called for clinical trials that would properly assess the safety and efficacy of using AI for those tasks, serving as a second pair of virtual eyes that could act as a gut check for human physicians, or help them when they encounter a case that is outside their experience or expertise.

AI can clearly be a force for good in health care, they said — so long as we recognize its limitations and use it in conjunction with, rather than as a replacement for, our human doctors.

“We’re witnessing a really........

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