Impacts of AI on Healthcare

Authors: Norah Chang, Julia Pitt, & Jayna Agrawal

For many years, scientists have debated the multifaceted impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the healthcare industry. Lets look at some ways how AI contributes to the medicine!

AI technology has the potential to positively transform the healthcare sector, while also presenting challenges that could negatively affect the industry. AI enhances the ability of healthcare professionals to assist patients quicker and more effectively. In the pharmaceutical sector, AI has significantly accelerated the drug research and manufacturing process. AI also enables the development of more therapeutics in shorter periods, thereby addressing a wider array of diseases and improving patient outcomes. Moreover, by finding new ways to repurpose existing medications, AI further contributes to the improvement of public health and the saving of lives.

In medical diagnostics, AI technologies are employed in MRIs and X-rays to accurately identify health conditions; by analyzing patterns in a patient’s history or genetic information, AI can provide quicker and more accurate diagnoses, helping doctors detect illnesses early on, and how to effectively treat them. Various AI algorithms assist healthcare facilities in optimizing the use of resources and reducing operational costs, by identifying more cost-effective alternatives. Furthermore, as technology progresses and innovation expands, robots are being utilized more often in precision surgeries, enabling more accurate procedures without the cost of human error, ultimately contributing to enhanced patient safety outcomes.

However, AI in the healthcare industry also has many pitfalls. It’s important to consider the risk that healthcare providers will become too reliant on AI, as technology continues to develop. By doing so, healthcare workers lose their own critical thinking and decision-making skills in the pharmaceutical field. Their decline in overall expertise would allow for AI to dominate this industry, which can lead to several issues.

For example, while AI can assist in the diagnosis and predict treatments, it is unable to provide a similar emotional bond between a patient and physician. It is crucial in a healthcare setting that the patient feels comfortable and can trust their doctor. Despite AI technologies being very advanced nowadays, they still will never be human-like and able to fully connect with a patient. Another issue with AI implemented into healthcare is the widespread energy and time needed to program these robots. Due to the fact that AI is trained by the data sets it is fed, and learns to make its own predictions, the AI itself can only predict, or in this case, diagnose, based on what has been inputted. Therefore, data sets for programming AI have to be very large and advanced in order to properly train a robot, requiring large costs and amounts of energy.

Also, AI is not able to provide the same amount of data privacy and security in the healthcare industry. Because health records are such sensitive information, they are a prime target for hackers. In many cases, AI trained for healthcare purposes is not made to prevent these data breaches. In most regular healthcare settings, patients give medical providers their consent to access their personal health data. Relating back to the idea of a lack of an emotional bond between a human and a robot, it is harder for a patient to give consent to AI and fully understand where their personal data could be going. 

In summary, AI crucially impacts the healthcare field, both positively and negatively. Although new technologies around AI are constantly being created and improved, AI will never have the capacity to fully replace human healthcare providers. It is important to gauge whether the positive impacts of AI outweigh the negatives, and to establish a balanced approach to AI, such that healthcare providers can benefit from its accuracy and efficiency without AI replacing them completely. While AI does have the potential to work alongside physicians and researchers and aid in new discoveries for the future, what should the extent of AI dominance in medicine be?

Citations:

Ellis, Lisa D. "The Benefits of the Latest AI Technologies for Patients and Clinicians." Harvard Medical School. Last modified August 30, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2025. https://postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu/trends-medicine/benefits-latest-ai-technologies-patients-clinicians.

James, Ted A. "How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Medicine and What it Means for Physicians." Harvard Medical School. Last modified April 13, 2023. Accessed March 13, 2025. https://postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu/trends-medicine/how-artificial-intelligence-disrupting-medicine-what-means-physicians.

Jr, Dalmacito Cordero. "The downsides of artificial intelligence in healthcare." Edited by Francis S. Nahm. National Library of Medicine. Last modified December 14, 2023. Accessed March 13, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10764219/.