AMA, DiMe launch AI framework for physicians amid rapid tech progress

With digital health and AI technologies advancing rapidly, concerns about how the physician's role will evolve remain among the nation's healthcare workforce. In an effort to address the issue, the American Medical Association and the Digital Medicine Society released a new framework outlining physicians' responsibilities in the age of AI.

The framework lists five responsibilities.

First and foremost, physicians must maintain patient trust, helping patients understand and navigate the healthcare journey, the AMA and DiME stated. Physicians are still ultimately responsible for making decisions that reflect the patients' goals and align with their circumstances and preferences.

Next, the industry groups said that physicians must demonstrate clinical judgment and apply their expertise appropriately when integrating clinical evidence, balancing competing risks and making clinical decisions.

Another responsibility, according to the framework, is that physicians must help shape technology-enabled care models and define the tasks that must remain in physicians' hands rather than other healthcare practitioners.

The framework further states that physicians must ensure that digital health and AI technologies are implemented safely, effectively and equitably. They must also provide insights into which areas of clinical practice can be digitized and which must remain under human physician oversight and how these new tools can be integrated into clinical workflows.

Finally, physicians are responsible for stewarding the profession and preparing future generations of physicians for the evolution of clinical practice, the AMA and DiME said.

"Individual tasks will evolve as technology advances, but the physician's enduring responsibilities remain remarkably stable," the framework document states. "The objective is not to preserve every task physicians perform today. It is to strengthen the unique contributions that patients will continue to rely on physicians to provide."

Along with the framework, the AMA and DiMe also released a roadmap for physicians to join forces with other stakeholders, including patients, technology developers, policymakers and payers, to strengthen physicians' role in patient care as the technology landscape advances.

The roadmap defines actions for each group to achieve shared goals. For instance, the guidance suggests that patients communicate their preferences and priorities for technology-enabled care, while policymakers and payers align policy and payment with outcomes and create a regulatory environment that supports physician-led care.

These resources come as the physicians' role becomes blurred amid AI's acceleration. While experts agree that human oversight is essential to ensure safe clinical decision-making, the clinical reasoning abilities of AI tools are evolving at an impressive pace.

A viewpoint published in JAMA earlier this week argued that AI will eventually eclipse physicians and provide better medical care. Penned by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, as well as Curai Health CEO Neal Khosla and Khosla Ventures Founder Vinod Khosla, the article takes a provocative stance.

"In cognitive medical functions, AI-alone medical care is likely to be better than physician-only or physician-AI hybrid care… The gap between physicians' and LLMs' performance will likely widen because AI is rapidly improving, whereas physicians' skills are threatened by AI-induced deskilling," they wrote.  

They also predicted that AI will likely be ready for real-world cognitive medical tasks across "maybe many" workflows by 2030.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers healthcare IT and innovation, including artificial intelligence, digital healthcare, EHRs and interoperability.