Survey: 60% of adults uncomfortable with AI in their healthcare

Survey: 60% of adults uncomfortable with AI in their healthcare unknown

Sixty percent of respondents said they would feel uncomfortable if their healthcare provider relied on AI to diagnose and treat them, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

The 2022 survey, which included responses from more than 11,000 U.S. adults, found that 66% of women said they would feel uncomfortable if their provider relied on AI for their medical care, while 54% of men expressed discomfort.

Still, 38% of respondents said AI's use to diagnose and treat patients would generally  lead to better patient health outcomes, while 33% said it would lead to worse results. Twenty-seven percent said it would make little difference.

Of the respondents who saw a problem with racial and ethnic bias in healthcare, 51% said these situations would improve if AI was used to diagnose disease and recommend treatments, while 15% said its use would worsen it. One-third of respondents said the problem of bias and unfair treatment would stay about the same.

Still, 57% of respondents said AI's use to diagnose disease and recommend treatment would worsen the patient-provider relationship. However, 40% said AI in healthcare would reduce provider mistakes.

Three-quarters of the adults surveyed expressed concerns that providers will implement AI too quickly before fully understanding the risks for patients, and 37% said using AI would worsen the security of healthcare records.

Regarding specific use cases of AI, 79% of respondents said they would not want to use an AI chatbot if they sought mental health support, while only 20% said they would.

Within the group of respondents aware of mental health chatbots before the survey, 71% of them said they would not want to use an AI chatbot for their own mental healthcare, and 46% of U.S. adults said AI chatbots should only be used by people who are also seeing a therapist. Twenty-eight percent said they should not be available to people at all.

WHY IT MATTERS

Investment in AI-based tools for healthcare has increased since the pandemic.

Still, doctors and patients need to build trust in the effectiveness and accuracy of machine learning models and be assured of AI's lack of bias.