Motivating Luddites Toward AI-Augmented Healthcare

Dr. Parisa Rashidi, an associate professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida is advocating congress to fast-track broader AI use in the healthcare sector.

She presented her expert insights twice during congressional briefings on regulating use of AI in healthcare last summer. In these presentations, she presented her opinion that medical AI should receive unfettered support. This comes from her experience as the co-director of the Intelligent Clinical Care Center (IC3) at UF where she works with AI and the human-centered healthcare system.

One of the challenges at the heart of the topic is how to merge AI with the current national healthcare model. Assistance from AI would mean doctors are able to spend less time with patients, which would be perceived as lower effort and result in lower reimbursement under current care models.

“How do we balance this?” Dr. Rashidi said. “There’s an inherent contradiction. It hinders the incentive to employ AI in the clinical setting. You can have the best models, but if the clinicians are financially sanctioned, you have a problem. In reality, the AI will serve as an assistive tool for decision-making, automating some of the routine, non-critical tasks, allowing clinicians to dedicate more time to the human touch of patient care. AI can never replace compassion.”

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