Preparing future doctors to be AI experts as medicine modernises | MEDICUS 2024 Issue 1

Preparing future doctors to be AI experts as medicine modernises
By Yu Zehan, Senior manager

Credit: iStock.com / Khanchit Khirisutchalual

With the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) extending into all aspects of medical care, a team of students from medical schools in Singapore and other countries has outlined an AI-centric medical curriculum framework that can be integrated into existing curricula globally. Their proposal, published in Cell Reports Medicine, aims to achieve parity in AI-readiness across institutions while emphasising links between AI concepts and evidence-based medicine. The goal is for future clinicians to develop robust clinical reasoning skills alongside substantial AI literacy.

“As doctors, we need to future-proof ourselves by acquiring a strong understanding of AI and its principles, so we can incorporate digitalisation into clinical workflows in the future to improve patient care and outcomes.”
Ms Faye Ng

The authors proposed structuring such a curriculum around four foundational pillars—technical concepts, validation methods, ethics and appraisal skills. This would accommodate students possessing differing levels of existing familiarity and competency. The students themselves are classified into three tiers within the proposal: consumers, translators and developers.

The first group includes all users of AI-tool users who require adequate knowledge to effectively identify and implement solutions for diagnoses and improved patient care in clinical settings. The translator tier comprises advanced users with a more specialised understanding of underlying data structures and AI functionality patterns to assess and validate system options.

Finally, the developer-level students drive novel AI application development for evolving healthcare insights and treatments. By focusing on designing end-to-end operational AI flows, and utilising the latest techniques, these specialists will steer cutting-edge digital health solutions leveraging patient data.

To support differential skill-building pathways for students of variable aptitudes and backgrounds, optional courses and modules can be offered, allowing students to deepen their skills in AI.

Fifth-year NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine student and the paper’s lead author, Faye Ng said, “As AI applications continue to proliferate in healthcare, the need to educate medical students to effectively appraise and use these tools is becoming more pressing. As doctors, we need to future-proof ourselves by acquiring a strong understanding of AI and its principles, so we can incorporate digitalisation into clinical workflows in the future to improve patient care and outcomes.”

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Echoing support for the tenets of the proposal, Professor Thomas Coffman, Dean of Duke-NUS, said, “As future doctors, our students must not only possess the requisite clinical knowledge and skills to deliver excellent care, but they also need a strong ethical foundation and professional compass to guide their practice, which will include decisions around AI adoption. That’s why at Duke-NUS, we start exposing all students to critical topics like AI ethics right in year one, before layering in a wider introduction to practical AI considerations in year two. However, given the rapid pace of changes in AI, we actively review and update course materials to ensure students remain prepared amidst a climate of digital transformation.”

Credit: iStock.com / miriam-doerr

Over at NUS, a compulsory minor in Biomedical Informatics was introduced for all NUS Medicine undergraduates to enable them to improve patient outcomes and information flow across healthcare systems by using a combination of data science, AI and other information technologies.

Professor Chong Yap Seng, Dean of NUS Medicine, said, “We have entered an era where AI and machine learning is commonplace. Our medical and nursing students need to be trained to have a competitive advantage. This means exposing them to different possibilities and scenarios that would allow them room to exercise critical thinking on how best they can apply their clinical skills to complement the vast potential of the current digital landscape, that could radically change the trajectory of medical and scientific advances for the better and usher in a new era of possibilities in digital health therapeutics.”

And a universal integration of AI into medical curricula is crucial to ensuring technologies are used safely and responsibly for healthcare insights.

At the AI Health Summit 2023, Associate Professor Daniel Ting from Duke-NUS and the SingHealth AI Office, who is the corresponding author of the proposal, highlighted the need to improve AI and data literacy of healthcare workers within and outside Singapore.

One way he believes this can be addressed is through clinical-AI partnerships, such as the SingHealth-AI Singapore partnership, which aims to co-develop an AI in Health curriculum: “Ultimately, we hope to educate all healthcare professionals and patients to be safe and responsible users, leveraging the cutting-edge AI and digital technologies to enable healthier local and global populations.”