AI Is Making More Work For Doctors, Not Less
Using artificial intelligence for some tasks may actually be contributing to heavier workloads for some physicians, according to new research from Dartmouth.
Using artificial intelligence for some tasks may actually be contributing to heavier workloads for some physicians, according to new research from Dartmouth.
AI tools can sometimes worsen doctors’ workloads by introducing errors and adding unnecessary details into their written messages to patients, according to Dartmouth’s study, which was presented on Tuesday at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in San Diego, California. The report also suggests that physicians may actually spend more time editing AI-generated responses than it would take to write them without using AI tools.
“We find that AI can sound like a doctor but not think like one,” Dartmouth Assistant Professor Of Computer Science Sarah Preum said in a statement.
Preum is the study’s co-corresponding author alongside Parker Seegmiller, a Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies PhD candidate in Preum’s PersistLab, according to Dartmouth’s news release.
The researchers also evaluated physician responses created by several AI platforms, including Claude, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Llama, Aloe, and Qwen. The research suggests that these AI-generated answers sometimes fail to align with how doctors would actually write information.
Common AI-generated errors included responses that were overly lengthy, left out essential follow-up questions and highlighted medical details that were irrelevant, inaccurate or inconsistent with clinical practice, according to the report.