Americans Reject Use of AI for Medical and Coverage Decisions
Most Americans don’t want artificial intelligence making decisions about their medical care and insurance, according to a new Pew Research Center report.
While Americans are generally open to AI use in healthcare for tasks like translating, 60% of the 3,488 US adults Pew surveyed in June said they were uncomfortable with AI helping their doctor make a diagnosis or treatment plans.
Anthropic, OpenAI and other tech giants herald AI as a way to make improvements to healthcare and have encouraged its widespread adoption. Yet nearly half of Americans believe AI will worsen their patient-doctor relationship and are split on whether it will improve patient outcomes.
“They generally don’t want AI operating solo,” Eileen Yam, the director of science and society research at Pew Research Center and lead author of the report, said in an interview. “They want a human in the loop doing final reviews.”
Only 5% of Americans were open to insurance claim decisions being made by AI without human review, and almost half of respondents said they did not want AI to play any role these decisions, according to the report.
Patients say they trust doctors to use AI in their best interests over health insurance companies, federal or state-level government, tech firms or hospital leadership.
More than half of respondents also said that they see AI posing a risk to their personal health information.
Americans’ attitudes were similar to what Pew Research found in 2022, but there was a broader negative shift among younger adults around AI in general.
As tech companies continue to promote AI in healthcare as a priority, Yam said that transparency will be key.
“For ordinary Americans navigating a world where AI is increasingly part of healthcare, we see in our data that their views on AI in healthcare are not a binary ‘thumbs up’ versus ‘thumbs down,'” she said. “Americans just want to be informed when AI is being used in their care.”
Photo: A bed in a hospital room in San Diego. Bloomberg photo.