AI and Clinical Practice—Can AI Accelerate Medical Education?
Oct 25, 2023
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JAMA Editor in Chief and Harvard's dean for medical education discuss AI's impact on medical education, including interactive learning, AI tools like ChachiPT for clinical decision-making, and challenges in training faculty.
Medical education needs to focus on higher-order skills like cognitive analysis and compassionate communication in the era of AI.
AI tools like ChachiPT can assist in various phases of medical education, refining clinical skills while emphasizing the importance of humanistic patient care.
Deep dives
AI and Transforming Medical Education
The podcast episode explores the potential paradigm shift in medical education caused by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on medical school applications, clinical teaching, and skill elevation for clinicians. The episode discusses the need to evolve curricula to reflect the era of AI, emphasizing the importance of higher-order skills such as cognitive analysis, compassionate communication, and physical exams. It highlights that while AI tools like ChachiPT are efficient at summarizing and analyzing medical data, the human skills of integrating knowledge and understanding patient nuances remain crucial. The goal is to train students as humanistic, AI-enabled physicians who can focus on interpersonal interactions and clinical decision-making while AI supports lower-level tasks.
Adapting Medical Education to the AI Era
The podcast episode delves into how AI tools like ChachiPT can be incorporated into various phases of medical education. It starts in the pre-clerkship curriculum, using AI as an educational tool to preview and consolidate knowledge for students. In clinical skills courses, AI can aid in the development of higher-level clinical skills, allowing students to focus on nuanced patient care. The episode anticipates an AI-integrated future where sub-internships, electives, and residencies utilize AI tools to refine differential diagnoses and aid clinical decision-making. The curriculum is expected to adapt in all phases, promoting efficient use of AI while ensuring students grasp the fundamentals and think critically for optimal patient care.
Addressing Challenges and Ensuring Ethical Use of AI
The podcast episode acknowledges the challenges and concerns related to the integration of AI in medical education. Educators must educate students about the limitations and potential biases of AI tools like ChatGPT. Accuracy, recognizing hallucinations, and understanding structural bias are important areas to address. Establishing educational policies and promoting prompt engineering (crafting specific prompts for desired responses) are crucial. The episode emphasizes the need for faculty development to familiarize educators with AI tools, encouraging them to try and experiment. It underscores the importance of emphasizing continuous learning, avoiding overreliance on AI, and maintaining a balance between human skills and AI capabilities.
In this Q&A, JAMA Editor in Chief Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS, and Bernard S. Chang, MD, MMSc, a neurologist and dean for medical education at Harvard Medical School, discuss how AI will change medical education, admissions, and teaching the future generation of physicians and clinicians. Related Content:
