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CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

radiologybusiness.com

31–40 of 121 posts

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#31
post #12

Why AI is able to do everything except CEO and social media hype up work? Why engineers and doctors still need CEOs to do their job? From the votes I see that this is unpopular opinion but apparently there are close to 400 million companies in the world, of those 60K are publicly traded. I am sure that there's enough data to train top notch CEO on this, since they are required to keep records all the time and give sp…

With a little extra irony, I’m honestly certain our HR dept could easily be replaced with AI to far better effect. They would surely disagree.

The job description should be sufficient prompt to replace the HR, add some RAG and skill files based on a few months of in-company chat tool data and paperwork, I don't see why there's still HR around. The AI HR can choose to hire entertainers etc. for some tasks but why would keep HR on payroll al the time?

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#32
post #8

> Sandra Scott, MD, CEO of the One Brooklyn Health, a small hospital facing tight margins, agreed with this line of thinking, according to Crain’s. Does this CEO of a small hospital realize that their hospital will take the legal responsibility if there's no doctor to sue for malpractice?

Speaking of which... when people talk about "replacing" humans with AI, it makes me wonder if there's some kind of law we can push for that says "if you are part of the chain of command that signs off on AI being able to make final determinations, and that causes legal issues, you will be legally liable in place of the AI, since computers cannot be liable." Let a jury decide who, in the chain, bears what burden, case…

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Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#33

I figured this was “CEO said a thing” journalism [1], but buried in the last paragraph is a real scorcher: > “Undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients: easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care,” [Radiologist Dr.] Suhail told Radiology Business. “Any attempt to implement AI-only reads would immediately result in patient ha…

If hospitals are so concerned about cutting costs, getting sued is probably worse. However they are all insured against malpractice. I would be careful about insurers who could default if they find too many malpractice claims.

To be frank I'm more concerned about non-litiguous countries here as the potential downsides are much lower to roll-out "AI radiologists". Some of those countries have multi-month or even year-long waitlists for specialist consultations so it might even be more tempting from a healthcare management level.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#34
post #24

How about we started replacing all companies that are replacing humans with AI using AI as well? As they decided to one-way participate in the economy (suck the money, not give anything back), we can make sure the one-way trend is done with rapidly. The cost of running a company will approach zero in the future. We now have massively profitable companies that are making record layoffs; something doesn't compute.

It would be interesting to start a co-op or non-profit run by AI for the benefit of the employees and customers. If it worked it would have a huge competitive advantage. I guess the question is where would the capital come from, but as a co-op the employees could buy in and just take the profits as a distribution.

Thinking about this some more: US tax laws really favor income from investment over income from wages. So ideally a co-op member would put something in to join, get a wage, and have an appreciating asset in a tax advantaged account.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#35
This should not be surprising. The CEO's primary objective is likely to increase profits and so this will be his/her primary focus. Even if the technology is not ready for prime time just making announcements like this likely helps increase negotiating pressure on radiologist group contracts and salaries.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#36

I figured this was “CEO said a thing” journalism [1], but buried in the last paragraph is a real scorcher: > “Undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients: easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care,” [Radiologist Dr.] Suhail told Radiology Business. “Any attempt to implement AI-only reads would immediately result in patient ha…

If hospitals are so concerned about cutting costs, getting sued is probably worse. However they are all insured against malpractice. I would be careful about insurers who could default if they find too many malpractice claims.

Isn't it also in the insurer's best interest that the hospitals do good work? They'd be another force against hospitals using AI to diagnose or misdiagnose people.

Of course, given that these are legal cases, it would take years for any consequences to be turned into actions.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#37
I stand to be corrected, but last time this cropped up about a year ago, there was a pretty severe mismatch in the use of the word "AI".

The NYT ran a story about "AI taking over radiology", where they talked to radiologists at the Mayo clinic (who have an AI research lab), who flatly told NYT that no - AI will not be replacing radiologists, the AI is not good enough.

Here is the rub though, the "AI Lab" was doing research using local CNN's with ~30M parameters. Basically 2017 consumer GPU tier AI tech.

I don't know yet if there has been a modern transformer of datacenter scale that has been explicitly pre-trained for medicine/radiology, along with extensive medical/radiology RLHF.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hospitals are so concerned about cutting costs, getting sued is probably worse. However they are all insured against malpractice. I would be careful about insurers who could default if they find too many malpractice claims.

To be frank I'm more concerned about non-litiguous countries here as the potential downsides are much lower to roll-out "AI radiologists". Some of those countries have multi-month or even year-long waitlists for specialist consultations so it might even be more tempting from a healthcare management level.

For folks with long wait times, maybe the advantage of "immediate access to AI radiologist" beats out "wait for human radiologist"? Would be interesting to weigh those harms against each other.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#39
post #27
post #19

Brother-in-law graduated med school in the early 90s and has been a practicing ER physician since. We discussed this recently and he related that his advisors told him not to go into radiology back in the late 80s because the assumption was that computers were going to take over the field. He's not too far away from retirement and it's only now that we're starting to see some signs of this prediction from 30+ years a…

The issue with radiologists is that on average they are able to spot ~35% of correct diagnoses, while the world's best radiologists ~45%. AI might get us to ~50% which is ~15% better than an average radiologist (who still needs to review it).

Where are you getting these numbers? Even a cursory search doesn’t put the numbers anywhere near such poor performance by real people.

AI at 50% would be notably worse (also where are you getting that number?)

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#40
post #24

How about we started replacing all companies that are replacing humans with AI using AI as well? As they decided to one-way participate in the economy (suck the money, not give anything back), we can make sure the one-way trend is done with rapidly. The cost of running a company will approach zero in the future. We now have massively profitable companies that are making record layoffs; something doesn't compute.

It would be interesting to start a co-op or non-profit run by AI for the benefit of the employees and customers. If it worked it would have a huge competitive advantage. I guess the question is where would the capital come from, but as a co-op the employees could buy in and just take the profits as a distribution. Thinking about this some more: US tax laws really favor income from investment over income from wages. S…

Something like that. I'll try to do it as a side project next as I have some spare compute and ran 99% automated e-commerce companies before.
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