Within a few years, doctors will have to bring computers into their practices to help diagnose and treat patients or face lawsuits for providing subpar medical care, a panel of ethicists has concluded.
Indeed, the first legal action against a physician for failing to consult a computer could be filed at any time, said Kenneth Goodman of the University of Miami medical school.
The ethicists, who presented their findings Friday in Chicago to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said studies already have shown that computers are more accurate than human doctors at predicting which patients under hospital intensive care will survive.
Also, computers have beaten humans at predicting which patients are at risk of heart attacks, the experts said.
Even though computer programs are devised by physicians in medical research centers, most doctors aren`t eager to bring computer programs into their practice, Goodman said.
”Automatic medicine or artificial doctors are appalling to people who went to medical school to become physicians,” he said.
”They are generally aghast at the very idea of it.”
Goodman and his colleagues at the science meeting agreed that within three years computers will be considered a necessary component of state-of-the-art medical care.
But they agree that the trend doesn`t threaten human physicians with unemployment any time soon.
”There may be certain categories where using computers will lead to a diminished need,” said John Snapper of the Illinois Institute of Technology. ”Computers may reduce the need for anesthesiologists, for instance. But there won`t be a diminished need for doctors and their expertise.”
In a few decades, even that may change, said Terrell Ward Bynum of Southern Connecticut State University.
He noted that the Army and NASA are working to develop an automated battlefield stretcher that would diagnose a patient, deliver medication, jolts to the heart and so on, all without human intervention.
