From anecdotes to AI tools, how doctors make medical decisions is evolving with technology

The practice of medicine has undergone an incredible, albeit incomplete, transformation over the past 50 years, moving steadily from a field informed primarily by expert opinion and the anecdotal experience of individual clinicians toward a formal scientific discipline. Now, precision medicine is enabling providers to use a patient’s individual genetic, environmental and clinical information to further personalize their care. In practice, clinicians can use the framework of evidence-based medicine to formulate a specific clinical question about their patient that can be clearly answered by reviewing the best available research. One fundamental difference between efforts to personalize medicine now and prior to the Human Genome Project and electronic medical records, however, is that the mental capacity required to analyze the scale and complexity of individual patient data available today far exceeds that of the human brain. These AI systems may include components that predict whether the patient’s specific genetic variation negatively affects protein function and whether the patient’s symptoms are similar to specific rare diseases.