How can we benefit from AI in medicine?

Dan Perri, MD, is an associate professor of medicine in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University with clinical and research activities in the Divisions of General Internal Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology. He is also Chief Medical Information Officer at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, where he seeks to optimize safe and appropriate patient care through the innovative use of digital technologies.

What do you consider the biggest positive potentials of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine?

I think, in the short term, the best gains we’ll have from AI in medicine is helping with the administrative burden. This would be note generation helping with office practice efficiency.

But as we move and we get more reliable AI with more validated information, we can then use it to help us get vast amounts of medical content given to us succinctly. This could be within our electronic health records as suggestions or recommendations made for our patients.

In a future state, when patients start interacting with technology even more than they do today—when they have their own health records on their portable devices and share that with us, when they have Internet of Things devices measuring their blood sugars or their vital signs at home, when they have their watches that detect their heart rate and other information—we can have all that information delivered to us in a meaningful way, which we can use to help with our office visit, know the patient in a much greater context.

In the not too distant future, patients can potentially upload even their own genetic information. Then we can have very specific information to help us recommend a very personalized therapy for those patients.