JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Although AI is said to affect the health services, it is unclear how the information provided by AI will impact the patient-physician relationship in actual practice.

Objective:

This study aims to explore how the introduction of AI functions into the medical field will soon affect and change the role of the physician or the physician-patient relationship, and concerns about medical field in AI era.

Methods:

We conducted a focus group interview with a doctor based on informed consent. A verbatim transcript recording of all interviews was qualitatively analyzed using content analysis. The similarly extracted code is grouped into subcategories, then categories, and core categories. We continued interviewing, analyzing, and discussing until we got data saturation. In addition, we shared the results with all the interviewees and confirmed the contents to ensure the trustworthiness of the analysis results.

Results:

A total of nine participants that belonged to various clinical departments in the three groups were interviewed. We extracted three core categories and the axial codes associated with these categories, based on this analysis. The three core categories were as follows: functions expected to be replaced by AI, functions that will still be expected of human physicians, and concerns about the medical field in the AI era. In addition, we summarized the roles of physicians and patients and the changes in the clinical environment in the age of AI. It turned out that some of the current physician's functions were mainly replaced by AI functions, and some continued to be inherited as physician's functions. Furthermore, it was found that “functions extended by AI”obtained by processing a vast amount of information will emerge, and a new role for physicians will be created to deal with them.

Conclusions:

We presented our findings on how the medical process of physicians and patients will change after the full-scale implementation of AI technology. It is necessary to promote interdisciplinary discussions on how to overcome the challenges, referring to the discussions being conducted in other fields.