Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jul 16, 2024
Date Accepted: Jan 13, 2025
Physician perspectives on the potential benefits and risks of applying artificial intelligence in psychiatric medicine: Qualitative Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
As artificial intelligence (AI) tools are integrated more widely in psychiatric medicine, it is important to consider the impact these tools will have on clinical practice.
Objective:
This study aimed to characterize physician perspectives on the potential impact AI tools will have in psychiatric medicine.
Methods:
We interviewed 42 physicians involved in psychiatric care. These interviews utilized detailed clinical case scenarios involving the use of AI technologies in the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric conditions. Interviews were transcribed and subsequently analyzed using qualitative analysis methods.
Results:
Physicians highlighted multiple benefits of AI tools including potential support for optimizing pharmaceutical efficacy, reducing administrative burden, aiding shared decision-making, and increasing access to health services, and were optimistic about the long-term impact of these technologies. This optimism was tempered by concerns about potential near-term risks to both patients and themselves including misguiding clinical judgment, increasing clinical burden, introducing patient harms, and creating legal liability.
Conclusions:
Our results highlight the importance of considering specialist perspectives when deploying AI tools in psychiatric medicine.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.