Ready or not, health care is undergoing a massive transformation driven by artificial intelligence. But medical schools have barely started to teach about AI and machine learning — creating knowledge gaps that could compound the damage caused by flawed algorithms and biased decision-support systems.
“We’re going to be at a point where we’re not going to be able to catch up and be able to call out the technology defects or flaws,” said Erkin Ötleş, a machine learning researcher working toward his medical degree and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. “Without being armed with that set of foundational knowledge into how these things work, we’re going to be at a disadvantage.”
In a recent commentary published in Cell Reports Medicine, Ötleş and a group of physicians and educators from the University of Michigan called for medical educators to make AI less of an afterthought and more of a core concept in undergraduate medical training. They emphasize the idea of a spiral curriculum, in which students learn key points about AI in medicine at the start, then turn back to it again and again as they learn more specialized skills.
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But that won’t be easy to execute, said co-author and former Michigan medical school dean Jim Woolliscroft. Bureaucratic inertia keeps medical school curriculums from evolving quickly, and faculty themselves may not yet have the expertise to teach a new generation of doctors. In an interview with STAT, the student and the educator elaborated on how medical educators can kick-start the process of revamping AI training.
What’s the current state of medical education in artificial intelligence?
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Jim Woolliscroft: Medicine’s educational programs are not evolving essentially at all. There’s little tweaks, but there are not the sort of seismic changes that need to occur.
Erkin Ötleş: It’s not really specialized at all in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning. What you will often see, for those interested, is they will either take time out to do either a master’s, or what I’m doing, a combined M.D./Ph.D. Otherwise, people might be exposed through the research that they’re able to do as electives. As a student, you still need to go and direct your own study and you need to go inform yourself.
Is that enough? Or should AI be incorporated into the general medical curriculum?
Erkin Ötleş Courtesy Stephanie Ötleş
Ötleş: Artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to be so pervasive in our everyday practice that everyone will need to have some base level of understanding in order to at least evaluate the tools that they’re using. They don’t need to be experts and they don’t need to develop this stuff, but they need to be able to say, “I don’t think this works well,” and then be able to call up the developer and say, “I think we have a problem.” We need to start teaching people quickly, because we’re going to be behind the eight ball.
Woolliscroft: Medical students don’t know about this stuff, and they need to see …….