As the Presence of AI expands in healthcare, seniors are making sense of the shift.
Like any new technology, AI needs to earn the trust of its users before it becomes the new normal. That battle is playing out in healthcare settings in real time. Seniors, who make up 17% of the U.S. population but 37% of total healthcare spending, have some nuanced opinions to share.
What Seniors Think of the AI Trend in Healthcare
Compared to younger adults, older adults tend to be less trustful of AI in healthcare. When asked about how they would feel if their healthcare provider relied on AI, 64% of people 65 and older said they would feel “somewhat or very uncomfortable,” compared to 56% of adults ages 18 to 29. In the same study by Pew Research, when asked if they would want AI to be used in their own skin cancer screening, 59% of adults over 65 said they would “definitely or probably want” that, vs. 72% in the 18-29 age group.
And yet, by one measure, older adults actually see more potential for AI in healthcare than doctors see themselves. In an AARP survey of adults over 50, 73% said they could see AI being useful in some capacity for healthcare workers, freeing up their time for other tasks. In contrast, in a recent American Medical Association (AMA) survey, only 63% of doctors said they saw at least some advantage to the use of AI in their practice. (And 41% of doctors said they were equally excited and concerned about the potential uses of AI in their practice.)
Of course, using AI to free up time is different than relying on it to make life-or-death decisions. In the AARP survey, 82% of respondents said doctors who use AI should always make the final decision on diagnosis or treatment. The AMA agrees, and even refers to “augmented intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence” to make the point that this technology assists, but never replaces, the decision-making process of a medical professional.
Interestingly, according to AARP, more older men (57%) than women (44%) said they would feel comfortable knowing their doctor had used AI in their treatment recommendations. Another worry expressed in the survey is that, thanks to AI, doctors may end up spending even less time with patients than they already do.
How Seniors are Encountering AI at the Doctor’s Office
Two of the main ways that older adults are encountering AI in healthcare settings today are in diagnostic screenings and through patient education.
Diagnostic Screenings. Although seniors still sport a healthy skepticism about AI in healthcare, you might have noticed above that a majority would want their provider to use AI in the process of diagnosing their own skin cancer. That speaks to some serious trust in the technology, at least as applied in conjunction with a doctor’s expertise. And that trust is well-founded, according to the recent research into cancer diagnostics using AI. As one example, a Stanford study recently showed that doctors using AI were able to diagnose skin cancer more accurately. Another study showed that a group of women whose mammograms were scanned by AI had 20% more cancer detected than the control group. Right now, only about 9% of U.S. radiologists use AI in their imaging procedures, but expect to see that percentage grow.
Patient Education. The potential of AI to offer patient education is huge, and it’s one of the applications that busy doctors and nurses are most enthusiastic about. In a study that predates AI, four out of five older adults reported struggling to interpret the forms and charts handed to them by their doctor’s office. Advances in AI are now helping patients make sense of complicated health information and instructions on medications. HIPAA-compliant chatbots on some hospital and provider websites can answer patients’ questions about their care, offering a much faster response than the doctor can usually give. And in some places, AI is listening in on exam room conversations in order to create summary notes that can help both patient and doctor keep track of what was discussed.
And yet, in a University of Michigan Healthy Aging poll, 74% of adults over 50 said they would have “very little or no trust” in health information generated by AI. This wariness is also well-found, since the drawbacks to AI-generated patient education are real. AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and that data contains biases that remain invisible in the AI output. For example, AI trained on health data can only reflect the reality of people who have access to healthcare, excluding less privileged groups. Plus, AI famously hallucinates and provides false or misleading information. When that’s health information, the stakes are high.
It may seem like we’ve been talking about AI for many years, but it’s really only been glowing in the public imagination since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November of 2022. So, while seniors’ opinions are decidedly mixed at the moment, who knows what the coming year will bring? As AI enters more and more domains of daily life, it has more chances to earn seniors’ trust.
Sources:
https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/health/conditions-treatment/artificial-intelligence-health-care/
https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/digital/augmented-intelligence-medicine
https://www.statista.com/topics/11380/healthcare-for-the-elderly-in-the-us/#topicOverview
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/ai-in-healthcare
https://www.nature.com/articles/d44151-024-00107-6
https://www.breastcancer.org/screening-testing/artificial-intelligenceBlog posting provided by Society of Certified Senior Advisors
