Doctors Warm to AI Future in Healthcare, AMA Survey Finds

A new American Medical Association (AMA) report found growing physician enthusiasm and interest around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the healthcare workplace.

In the AMA Augmented Intelligence Research survey, doctors saw the biggest opportunity for AI as “address(ing) administrative burdens through automation.” That dovetails with Medscape’s AI Adoption in Healthcare Report 2024, published jointly with the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Physicians whose workplaces were already using AI told Medscape that transcribing patient notes and business meetings, and creating routine patient communications, were the leading applications so far.

The AMA research also found that 35% of doctors were more enthusiastic than concerned about AI in healthcare, and 25% felt the opposite (compared with 30% and 29%, respectively, in the AMA’s year-earlier report). Those feelings roughly track Medscape’s Physicians and AI Report 2023, in which 42% of physicians described themselves as enthusiastic about AI’s future in the healthcare workplace, 28% apprehensive, and 30% neutral.

Among the AMA’s other research insights into AI’s future in medicine:

• Sixty-eight percent of doctors said they saw a definite, or at least some, advantage to using AI tools, up from 63% a year earlier.

• Sixty-six percent of physicians said their workplaces already were using AI, vs just 38% in the prior-year report.

• Sixty-eight percent of doctors reported a definite, or at least some, advantage in AI applications for patient care.