60% of U.S. Adults are Uncomfortable with AI in their Healthcare: Survey

A new Pew Research Center survey has explored public views on artificial intelligence (AI) in health and medicine and found that there’s significant discomfort among Americans with the idea of AI being used in their own health care. 

Six-in-ten U.S. adults said they would feel uncomfortable if their own healthcare provider relied on artificial intelligence to do things like diagnose diseases and recommend treatments; a significantly smaller share (39%) said they would feel comfortable with this.

The Pew Research Center survey, conducted Dec. 12-18, 2022, of 11,004 U.S. adults found that only 38% said AI is used to do things like diagnose diseases and recommend treatments would lead to better health outcomes for patients generally, while 33% said it would lead to worse outcomes and 27% said it wouldn’t make much difference.

These findings come as public attitude toward AI continues to take shape, amid the ongoing adoption of AI technologies across industries and the accompanying national conversation about the benefits and risks that AI applications present for society. 

Asked in more detail about how the use of artificial intelligence would impact health and medicine, Americans identify a mix of both positives and negatives.

On the positive side, a larger share of Americans thought the use of AI in health and medicine would reduce rather than increase the number of mistakes made by healthcare providers (40% vs. 27%). And among the majority of Americans who see a problem with racial and ethnic bias in health care, a much larger share said the problem of bias and unfair treatment would get better (51%) than worse (15%) if AI was used more.

But there was a wide concern about AI’s potential impact on the personal connection between a patient and health care provider: 57% said the use of artificial intelligence would make the patient-provider relationship worse. Only 13% said it would be better.

The security of health records was also a source of some concern for Americans: 37% thought using AI would make the security of patients’ records worse, compared with 22% who thought it would improve security.

Click here to read the complete results of the survey.