It may be time to see a doctor after looking up all the warning signs and symptoms online. This is often the result one feels after reading from the medical online world, but now people may have a more advanced way of looking into their cough or rash.
Babylon Health is using artificial intelligence to offer information through a symptom checker app, according to Tech Xplore. Patients can receive feedback from the ‘app-bot’ about their condition.
Professor Martin Marshall, vice chair of RCGP, said clinical scenarios do not always have a cut and dry answer, so it is possible that an app can give general feedback while taking into account physical, psychological and social factors.
The chatbot was recently showed off at the Royal College of Physicians and offered “several possible scenarios along with a percentage-based estimate of each one being correct,” said the BBC.
Babylon Health founder, Ali Parsa said although AI cannot single handedly care for a patient, it can be complemented with a physician. The idea is that a human doctor uses the chatbot information and then conducts a follow-up video chat.
The AI element demonstrated the app’s ability to offer health advice that was on par with human clinicians. Researchers tested the AI alongside seven primary care doctors using vignettes. Babylon’s AI had an 80 percent accuracy score while the doctors averaged an accuracy score between 64 and 94 percent.
These results show that AI-augmented health services can help reduce the pressure on healthcare systems and physicians.
“The NHS has enormous intellectual capital and I want to be very clear about not driving that away,” said Malcom Grant, chair of NHS England, according to Bloomberg. “I want to be very clear that we will not drive GPs out of practice and see this as an Uber-style rival.”
The ideal situation would be for AI and the physician to improve each other in conjunction with their individual skills, said Parsa.
Parmy Olson in Forbes explained that the app delivered “an animated, 3D web of symptoms and diseases, as the voice of a woman resounded through the auditorium, answering automated questions from a chatbot about her recent dizzy spells.”
