Mainebiz

V O L . X X X I N O. X X V § 2 N OV E M B E R 3 , 2 0 2 5 12 A rtificial intelligence is often described as the next Industrial Revolution, with its full impact still emerging. Industries across the globe are adopting this transformative technology, and health care is no exception. From transcribing and analyzing data to assist- ing with diagnoses, AI is already improving patient care and easing clinician burnout. ough still in its early stages, AI in health care holds the potential to unlock a future of unprecedented possibilities. AI won't replace bedside manner C. Matt Graham, associate professor of infor- mation systems and security management at the Maine Business School at the University of Maine, made local headlines with the publication of his study, "Artificial intelligence vs human clinicians: a comparative analysis of complex medical query handling across the USA and Australia." Graham sifted through 7,165 medical queries from the data set, MEDIQA-QA, and compared those AI-generated responses against responses from human clinicians in the U.S. and Australia. e goal in his comparative analysis was to assess the responses' accuracy, professionalism, tone and overall usefulness to patients. According to Graham, the results showed that AI responses were generally more accurate, consis- tent and professional than those from human cli- nicians. AI excelled at delivering clear and detailed answers with the potential to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve patient satisfaction. But here's the catch: the AI responses often lacked emotional depth and empathy — or what is often referred to as bedside manner. Additionally, the AI's reliability depended heav- ily on the quality of the training data human cli- nicians provided. "e findings suggest that AI has real poten- tial to enhance health care delivery, especially in reducing clinician workload, speeding up patient communication and improving consistency, and this can also help in clinician burnout," Graham says. "But AI should not be reviewed as a replace- ment for human expertise. Instead, the best model is a collaborative one, where AI can handle rou- tine factual queries, and where clinicians provide judgment, empathy and trust." AI's strength lies in processing massive amounts of information and finding recurring patterns. How- ever, the technology is only as good as the quality of data sets that feed it. is makes it susceptible to biases or blind spots if the data it is built on does not include the full diversity of the population. Work is being done to integrate emotional intelligence into AI systems. While AI technol- ogy rapidly unfurls, Graham's work emphasizes that AI is a tool, not a replacement for human health care providers. "Automated tasks are going to reduce the AI is a resource in health care Shifting the focus back to patient care B y S l o a n e M . P e r r o n

• Cover