First few Article Sentences
“Hey Siri, Hey Alexa: reorder my prescriptions…schedule my colonoscopy...pay my copay…”. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over the world if you believe the content of movies, television shows and advertising. The most famous AI characters that we all remember are ‘HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey’ and the famous ‘Agent Smith from the Matrix Trilogy’. These examples of artificial intelligence provide us with rational thought, good and bad, all knowing and seeing. Our imagination runs wild about how AI will affect the practice of medicine.
As healthcare practitioners most of us think of artificial intelligence as BIG DATA being collected through your electronic medical records, converted to treatment protocols and the eventual grading of your work. The definition of artificial intelligence is ‘the theory and development of computer systems able to perform repetitive tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages’. In the day to day healthcare world that most of us work, the definition of artificial intelligence should be “automated repetitive tasks that can be easily programmed using a machine (software) and that the machine can continue to improve the performance of the process, without a human explaining the next step”. In its simplest form, think Siri, think Alexa, think voice recognition dictation into a computer that is converted to an accurate record. No more typing into that EMR!