JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The increasing development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in medicine driven by researchers and entrepreneurs goes along with enormous expectations for medical care advancement. AI might change the clinical practice of physicians from almost all medical disciplines and in most areas of healthcare. While expectations for AI in medicine are high, practical implementations of AI for clinical practice are still scarce in Germany. Moreover, physicians’ requirements and expectations of AI in medicine and their opinion on the usage of anonymized patient data for clinical and biomedical research has not been investigated widely in German university hospitals.

Objective:

Evaluate physicians’ requirements and expectations of AI in medicine and their opinion on the secondary usage of patient data for (bio)medical research e.g. for the development of machine learning (ML) algorithms in university hospitals in Germany.

Methods:

A web-based survey was conducted addressing physicians of all medical disciplines in 8 German university hospitals. Answers were given on Likert scales and general demographic responses. Physicians were asked to participate locally via email in the respective hospitals.

Results:

121 (39.9%) female and 173 (57.1%) male physicians (N=303) from a wide range of medical disciplines and work experience levels completed the online survey. The majority of respondents either had a positive (130/303, 42.9%) or a very positive attitude (82/303, 27.1%) towards AI in medicine. A vast majority of physicians expected the future of medicine to be a mix of human and artificial intelligence (273/303, 90.1%) but also requested a scientific evaluation before the routine implementation of AI-based systems (276/303, 91.1%). Physicians were most optimistic that AI applications would identify drug interactions (280/303, 92.4%) to improve patient care substantially but were quite reserved regarding AI-supported diagnosis of psychiatric diseases (62/303, 20.5%). 82.5% of respondents (250/303) agreed that there should be open access to anonymized patient databases for medical and biomedical research.

Conclusions:

Physicians in stationary patient care in German university hospitals show a generally positive attitude towards using most AI applications in medicine. Along with this optimism, there come several expectations and hopes that AI will assist physicians in clinical decision making. Especially in fields of medicine where huge amounts of data are processed (e.g., imaging procedures in radiology and pathology) or data is collected continuously (e.g. cardiology and intensive care medicine), physicians’ expectations to substantially improve future patient care are high. However, for the practical usage of AI in healthcare regulatory and organizational challenges still have to be mastered.