The Transformation of Patient-Clinician Relationships With AI-Based Medical Advice: A "Bring Your Own Algorithm" Era in Healthcare
This addresses challenges in healthcare interactions for patients and clinicians due to the increasing use of AI-based tools, but it is incremental as it builds on existing trends in medical information access.
The paper tackles the emergence of 'Bring Your Own Algorithm' (BYOA) in healthcare, where patients and clinicians use AI tools for diagnosis and prediction, and argues that this trend is transforming patient-clinician relationships and requires integrated technological and organizational solutions.
One of the dramatic trends at the intersection of computing and healthcare has been patients' increased access to medical information, ranging from self-tracked physiological data to genetic data, tests, and scans. Increasingly however, patients and clinicians have access to advanced machine learning-based tools for diagnosis, prediction, and recommendation based on large amounts of data, some of it patient-generated. Consequently, just as organizations have had to deal with a "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) reality in which employees use their personal devices (phones and tablets) for some aspects of their work, a similar reality of "Bring Your Own Algorithm" (BYOA) is emerging in healthcare with its own challenges and support demands. BYOA is changing patient-clinician interactions and the technologies, skills and workflows related to them. In this paper we argue that: (1) BYOA is changing the patient-clinician relationship and the nature of expert work in healthcare, and (2) better patient-clinician-information-interpretation relationships can be facilitated with solutions that integrate technological and organizational perspectives.