Lawmakers and regulators in Washington are beginning to wonder how to regulate artificial intelligence in the medical field, and the AI industry believes it has a high potential for disruption.
“This is an incredibly daunting problem,” said Bob Wachter, dean of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “There’s a risk that guns will come in and over-regulate.”
Already, the impact of AI on healthcare is far-reaching. The Food and Drug Administration has approved approximately 692 AI products. Algorithms can help schedule patients, determine emergency room staffing levels, and even transcribe and summarize clinical visits to save doctors time. A radiologist is starting to help her read her MRI and her X-rays. Wachter says he sometimes informally refers to a version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 large-scale language model for complex cases.
Given the reach of AI and the potential for future change, governments are already playing catch-up.
“Policymakers are woefully behind the times,” Michael Yang, senior managing partner at venture capital firm Omars Ventures, said in an email. Yang’s colleagues have invested heavily in this field. Venture capital firm Rock Health says financiers have poured nearly $28 billion into digital health companies focused on artificial intelligence.
Wachter said one of the issues regulators are grappling with is that unlike drugs, which will still have the same chemistry five years from now, AI will change over time. But governance is taking shape, with the White House and multiple health agencies developing rules to ensure transparency and privacy. Congress has also expressed interest. The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on AI in healthcare on February 8th.
