Dive Brief:
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Patients are getting more comfortable with artificial intelligence tools making diagnosis or treatment decisions, according to a new Gallup survey.
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Over half of U.S. adults said that they would be fine with AI tools making clinical decisions about their care, but only if their healthcare provider can review and override those decisions, indicating that having human oversight of AI is still important to patients.
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But providers severely underestimate how comfortable patients are with AI making clinical decisions even with their oversight, with only about a third saying patients would be on board with this use of AI.
Dive Insight:
Research has shown that patients support AI use for low-risk administrative tasks like appointment scheduling but prefer that AI not make diagnoses, even when a human reviews the output.
However, the Gallup survey, which polled more than 5,000 American adults in August, indicates that patients may be more comfortable with AI than expected.
People are most comfortable with AI diagnosing them and making treatment decisions, with the majority wanting providers to sign off, according to the survey. Over a third also said they are fine with AI assisting providers in making decisions.
When it comes to selecting medications and reviewing images, patients also prefer provider oversight, and their comfort with AI drops sharply if a provider is not involved in the decision-making at all.
However, a separate Gallup poll of over 1,000 practicing primary care physicians shows a major gap between what they think patients are comfortable with and what patients actually deem acceptable.
There is a 20-percentage-point gap between how comfortable patients are with AI making diagnostic and treatment decisions and how comfortable providers think patients are. Similarly, more patients are comfortable with AI making medication decisions and performing imaging reviews than providers assume.
According to the report authors, this shows that providers should ask patients their preference about how AI is used in their care.
Healthcare providers being able to review AI’s decisions emerged as the most critical factor in boosting patient comfort with the technology in clinical care.
Nearly half of adults in the consumer survey said that provider review made them more comfortable with AI-led decisions on diagnosis and treatment and imaging review, more so than other factors, including privacy protections, safety and efficacy studies and lower healthcare costs. Having strong privacy protections was the next most important factor increasing patient comfort with AI, with a third of patients saying it would make them more comfortable with AI taking the reins, even without provider review.
Tracking patient comfort with AI is especially important as the healthcare industry allows AI to act more autonomously, even in work that directly impacts patient care. Just last month, Utah approved a slate of new healthcare pilots that would eventually allow prescriptions to be issued and refilled without clinician review.
Further, a growing number of healthcare organizations are piloting or conducting proof-of-concept projects with agentic AI tools, which can make complex decisions and complete multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention.
