Healthcare professional, according to a new survey, hope that the AI-induced efficiencies, as demonstrated by other industries, will spill over to healthcare to help reduce the impact of worker shortages.
The vast majority of healthcare workers (86.1 percent) feel they have a good understanding of how AI is used in healthcare, compared to only 57 percent of the general population. This is according to a survey from Carta Healthcare.
Although nearly three-quarters (73.1%) of healthcare professionals report knowing if they are actively using AI in their health practice, this isn’t common knowledge for patients. Most patients (71 percent) do not know whether or not their healthcare providers use AI.
Healthcare workers and patients agree on one point regarding AI: They have trust issues. Just over one-third (36.7 percent) of healthcare workers say they trust AI in healthcare. Similarly, only 38 percent of patients trust AI in healthcare.
These findings underscores the need to always have a human subject matter expert in the loop to review AI results and make decisions; AI should never be trusted to make healthcare decisions or present information to a patient without SME review.
Despite reasonable AI trust issues that can be addressed with human review, the vast majority (85.3 percent) of healthcare professionals believe AI can help improve patients’ healthcare experience, and more than three-quarters (76.9 percent) think that AI could be useful to help combat labour shortages.
Throughout the survey, healthcare workers cite specific AI use cases that have already helped the most to combat labour shortages, such as AI for data analytics, entry, and management for clinical documentation (73.9 percent), followed by AI/automated tools to reduce duplicate paperwork (65.7 percent).
The new healthcare technologies that healthcare workers are interested in are:
- Medical imagery to spot early diseases (55.6 percent).
- Technology to facilitate data entry and paperwork to reduce the administrative burden (52.2 percent).
- Diagnostic expediency for better patient outcomes (49 percent).
These findings are based on a U.S. national online survey of 502 healthcare professionals conducted by Propeller Insights for Carta Healthcare.
