In, on, or out of the Loop: Doctors in the Age of AI | Ethan Goh, MD

Hi,

I'm Henry Baer.

And I'm Tyler Johnson.

And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine.

Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered, what makes medicine meaningful? Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor-patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?

In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and healthcare executives, those who have collected a career's worth of hard-earned wisdom.

Probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening.

We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do.

Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.

It wasn't that many years ago that self-driving cars were the stuff of science fiction, but in what feels like the blink of an eye, driverless cars now roam the streets of a growing number of cities across the country.

In fact, It's not all that difficult to imagine a future in which the sheer risk of driving one's own car is considered unethical.

The trajectory of artificial intelligence in medicine may follow a similar arc.

As AI becomes increasingly adept at diagnosing patients and recommending treatment plans, It's not hard to imagine a day when it would be unethical for a doctor not to consult AI.

Our guest on this episode is Dr. Ethan Goh, an internal medicine physician and executive director of ARISE, Harvard and Stanford's research network focused on advancing the evaluation and deployment of AI in healthcare.

In addition to his role at Arise, Dr. Goh is the program director of Stanford's Healthcare AI Leadership Program and a visiting faculty researcher at Google.

His extensive work has been published in Nature Medicine, Science, and JAMA, with media coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN.

Over the course of this episode, Dr. Goh details the current capabilities of AI in the medical space, including the surprising finding that AI alone does better at diagnosing disease than doctors who are themselves using AI.

We discuss the limitations of studies that compare AI to doctors in relatively noise-free tests and consider the importance of designing workflows that allow healthcare providers to work synergistically with AI.

Finally, Dr. Goh reminds us that medicine isn't just about coming to the right answer.

It is also about care.

and the value of a person in the room who understands a patient's disease as well as their humanity is not easily replaced.

Thank you so much,

Ethan, for being with us.

Thanks, Adam.

Excited for this conversation.