An online survey completed by more than 900 U.S. adults reveals an overall openness to AI for several scenarios in healthcare.
The results likely reflect the makeup of the self-selected participant field, which skewed white, healthy, college-educated and youngish: Although respondents spanned 18 to 83 years old, the mean age was 37.
Still, the study’s authors suggest, the research succeeds in demonstrating a novel way to analyze public perceptions of healthcare AI that could be adapted in future studies.
The study was conducted at Washington University in St. Louis and is current this month in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.
Organizational psychologist Alison Antes, PhD, and colleagues found the cohort most ready to embrace AI monitoring for heart attack risk, followed by AI for predicting cancer survival, diagnosing a broken ankle and selecting antianxiety medication.
“Openness to these uses of AI may be partly due to familiarity,” the authors note. “These are high prevalence diseases, and the majority of Americans report frequent exposure to information about prevention of these diseases.”
Scenarios proving the least acceptable included face recognition for post-surgery pain surveillance and a mental-health app.
Here the lack of enthusiasm may indicate “perceptions of invasiveness, desire for human involvement or stigma related to pain medication and mental health treatment.”
In questions designed to gauge trust in the healthcare system and in technology generally, the team found those factors most closely associated with overall openness to healthcare AI and perceptions of potential benefits and harms.
“Plans for the development and implementation of AI in healthcare will need to consider ways to build and maintain trust,” Antes and co-authors write. “It may also be important to examine how interpersonal trust with individual physicians may shape behaviors and attitudes related to AI technologies.”
This tracks with Americans who in recent years have expressed falling trust in physicians and in U.S. healthcare as a whole, the authors note.
Other key findings from the study:
- Agreeableness and conscientiousness were the strongest correlates with those higher in agreeableness and conscientiousness perceiving greater benefit.
- Social conservatism was related to lower concern scores but only slightly.
- Trust in health and trust and faith in technology were the strongest correlates of openness, concern and benefit scores.
Antes et al. acknowledge several limitations in their study design. These include its lack of a mechanism for showing stability of perceptions over time.
Still, they suggest, the project “provided evidence that a combination of socio-demographics, health-related and psychosocial variables may contribute to individuals’ perceptions. … [We] hope this study stimulates additional research.”
The study’s co-senior authors are medical/research ethicist James Dubois, PhD, and St. Louis University surgeon Jason Keune, MD.
The study is available in full for free.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.