The debate over whether AI will eventually outdiagnose — or even replace — physicians rages on. But Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner is skeptical.
During a June 23 interview with Ms. Faulkner at Aspen Ideas: Health in Colorado, Jon LaPook, MD, chief medical correspondent for CBS News and professor of medicine at New York City-based NYU Langone Health, asked her what it will even mean to be a clinician in five years. He pointed to research suggesting AI can already outperform physicians at diagnosis — and that adding a physician to the mix can degrade the models’ results.
“What we hear people say is that the physician plus the AI is better than either of them alone,” Ms. Faulkner said.
She said students entering medical school are now being told to choose specialties that rely on using their hands rather than their minds, on the theory that cognitive work will be automated first.
“I don’t know that I agree with that … because then they’re going to have robots that replace the hands too,” she said.
Ms. Faulkner said AI is good for surfacing patterns. She pointed to sepsis, a frequently missed condition that turns deadly when caught late.
“The problem with sepsis is that there are so many things [going on with] that patient — typically it’s very hard for human beings to put it all together and figure out this person’s going to be septic soon,” she said.
So she urged health systems to adopt some form of sepsis-detection tool, regardless of which vendor supplies it.
The same logic applies to Epic’s Cosmos, its research database of more than 300 million deidentified patients. When a physician records a diagnosis, the software can compare the case against similar patients and show how often other clinicians reached the same conclusion.
“That will help the doctor decide, should he or she change it or should they stick with it,” Ms. Faulkner said.
She offered another example: When a physician encounters a patient whose condition stumps both them and their colleagues, Epic can search records nationwide to identify a small number of similar patients and connect the treating clinicians. The company has done this about 10,000 times, she said.
Ms. Faulkner described a time she was driving her Tesla on autopilot at night. The car slowed unexpectedly, then sped back up; she realized afterward that it had detected a police car hidden in the dark that she had not seen.
“I thought that’s going to be what happens with the doctors and the AI,” she said. “The AI will figure things out that the doctor would not have been aware of, like with sepsis … and that will help the doctor.”
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