The Transformation of Patient-Clinician Relationships With AI-Based Medical Advice: A "Bring Your Own Algorithm" Era in Healthcare

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI-based medical advice and the 'Bring Your Own Algorithm' trend are transforming patient-clinician relationships, emphasizing the need for integrated technological and organizational solutions.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of BYOA in healthcare, analyzing its impact on relationships and proposing integrated solutions to support this new dynamic.

Findings

BYOA is reshaping patient-clinician interactions.

Effective integration of technology and organization can improve relationships.

Challenges include adapting workflows and skills for AI tools.

Abstract

One of the dramatic trends at the intersection of computing and healthcare has been patients' increased access to medical information, ranging from self-tracked physiological data to genetic data, tests, and scans. Increasingly however, patients and clinicians have access to advanced machine learning-based tools for diagnosis, prediction, and recommendation based on large amounts of data, some of it patient-generated. Consequently, just as organizations have had to deal with a "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) reality in which employees use their personal devices (phones and tablets) for some aspects of their work, a similar reality of "Bring Your Own Algorithm" (BYOA) is emerging in healthcare with its own challenges and support demands. BYOA is changing patient-clinician interactions and the technologies, skills and workflows related to them. In this paper we argue that: (1) BYOA is changing the patient-clinician relationship and the nature of expert work in healthcare, and (2) better patient-clinician-information-interpretation relationships can be facilitated with solutions that integrate technological and organizational perspectives.