The Medical Authority of AI: A Study of AI-enabled Consumer-facing Health Technology
This research addresses the impact of AI on medical authority for consumers and designers of health technology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing studies of technology in healthcare.
The study investigated how AI-based symptom checkers (AISCs) transform medical authority in healthcare by interviewing thirty users, finding that users assess authority based on factors like automated decisions, design patterns, and associations with established medical institutions.
Recently, consumer-facing health technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based symptom checkers (AISCs) have sprung up in everyday healthcare practice. AISCs solicit symptom information from users and provide medical suggestions and possible diagnoses, a responsibility that people usually entrust with real-person authorities such as physicians and expert patients. Thus, the advent of AISCs begs a question of whether and how they transform the notion of medical authority in everyday healthcare practice. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with thirty AISC users. We found that users assess the medical authority of AISCs using various factors including automated decisions and interaction design patterns of AISC apps, associations with established medical authorities like hospitals, and comparisons with other health technologies. We reveal how AISCs are used in healthcare delivery, discuss how AI transforms conventional understandings of medical authority, and derive implications for designing AI-enabled health technology.