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“During COVID, I was working in the hospital – at Kaiser, Redwood City at the time – and I was also working in a nursing home. I saw firsthand the limitations that we had during COVID, especially with social isolation and the need for tech, not just AI but just tech in general. That’s when I started exploring solutions that tech can provide.
The most common application (of AI) is using it for clerical workflow…automating referrals and faxes, these kind of things. Billing is another one where AI can actually help you capture all the possible codes, so you’re not really leaving money on the table which you would otherwise be able to get billed for. Physicians are incentivized to use it because AI is much more effective than somebody just doing it with a pen and paper.
If you’re dealing with a rare disease, then it can be very helpful because it can pull a lot of the data – all these studies, scientific research that have been done because of how efficient it is. If it doesn’t hallucinate, it could create a summary of actual research and present it to me within minutes. Versus, it would take me hours to read through all these different research papers and come to the same conclusion. So as long as the hallucination piece is fixed, I think we can rely on it for those things.
Everybody asks me this question: Is AI going to replace doctors? And I firmly believe that I think it will not.”
Dr. Aifra Ahmed
It can collect data from the patient. It can ask them all these questions that a physician would ask. There are solutions that are being created – they’re called Clinical Decision Interpretation, CDIs – that companies are using to assist the physician. So almost like a physician assistant that can create the data, summarize it, and some companies are even looking into suggesting a possible top few diagnoses and suggesting possible treatments. I think that’s useful as long as the final decision is made by the doctor who’s licensed and is going to be taking the liability of what happens next. I think that’s a safe way to use AI in medicine.
When you get into diagnostics, AI cannot compete yet cannot compete with a physician who’s gone through so much training. In medicine we’re dealing with life and death in most cases. I work in the hospital at night. I see patients with heart attacks and strokes, and I can’t just depend on an AI bot who could hallucinate in that critical moment.
Everybody asks me this question: Is AI going to replace doctors? And I firmly believe that I think it will not. Maybe we will need fewer doctors to do the same job, but we will still need doctors just because it’s such an important field.
The human element in the physician-patient relationship is critical – the empathy and that trust. I don’t think you can take away that element. But I think making physicians more effective and efficient, and more accurate, AI has a big role to play. As long as we are using it for the right reasons, I think there’s so many applications.”
Dr. Aifra Ahmed is an internal medicine physician. She is the chief medical officer of APPNA Community Health Center, a free community clinic in San Jose. She also works as a hospital physician at Palo Alto Medical Foundation and a concierge medicine doctor for Meta. Previously, she was the medical director of an AI healthcare startup.
This profile is one of nineteen featured in the “Humans in an age of AI” portrait series. See more profiles here.
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