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With artificial intelligence making deep inroads into health care, two doctors are urging physicians to embrace the technology but to remember that only humans can serve the best interests of individual patients.

The University of Virginia School of Medicine's Andrew S. Parsons, M.D., M.P.H., and Harvard Medical School's Adam Rodman, M.D., M.P.H., note in a new commentary that AI is growing increasingly sophisticated. The technology can already match or exceed human doctors at certain tasks, such as making diagnoses from written cases and electronic health records. That has prompted debate about whether AI will soon replace doctors for many applications.

Parsons and Rodman, however, note that deciding how to manage a patient's care—choosing treatments, tests and follow-up that fit the patient's goals and circumstances—cannot be reduced to a "correct" answer. AI may be able to identify a patient's medical condition, but deciding what to do next means choosing which risks a particular patient should accept, and a recommendation that works in theory can fail in practice.

"Guidelines and trials skew toward the populations studied, and real patients frequently fall outside those norms because of complex comorbid conditions and social circumstance or because their goals differ from a trial's end points," Parsons and Rodman write. "Deviating from the technically correct answer is often good medicine, and someone must answer for that deviation."

And there lies the real role for human doctors in the medicine of tomorrow, the authors argue.

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