The Medical Authority of AI: A Study of AI-enabled Consumer-facing Health Technology

TL;DR

This study explores how AI-based symptom checkers influence perceptions of medical authority, revealing user assessments based on design, associations, and comparisons, and discusses implications for health technology design.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into how AI-enabled health tools reshape traditional medical authority through user perceptions and interaction factors.

Findings

Users consider design and decision automation in authority assessment.

Associations with hospitals influence trust in AISCs.

Comparisons with other health tech affect perceived credibility.

Abstract

Recently, consumer-facing health technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based symptom checkers (AISCs) have sprung up in everyday healthcare practice. AISCs solicit symptom information from users and provide medical suggestions and possible diagnoses, a responsibility that people usually entrust with real-person authorities such as physicians and expert patients. Thus, the advent of AISCs begs a question of whether and how they transform the notion of medical authority in everyday healthcare practice. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with thirty AISC users. We found that users assess the medical authority of AISCs using various factors including automated decisions and interaction design patterns of AISC apps, associations with established medical authorities like hospitals, and comparisons with other health technologies. We reveal how AISCs are used in healthcare delivery, discuss how AI transforms conventional understandings of medical authority, and derive implications for designing AI-enabled health technology.