AI taking over physicians' practices, burdening them....Humans using "generative AI" to combat one another
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PS “In an effort to spare his patients what he deemed subpar care, and himself mountains of paperwork, Dr. Tariq recently turned to an unlikely tool: generative A.I.For a growing number of doctors, A.I. chatbots — which can draft letters to insurers in seconds — are opening up a new front in the battle to approve costly claims, accomplishing in minutes what years of advocacy and attempts at health care reform have not."We haven’t had legislative tools or policymaking tools or anything to fight back,” Dr. Tariq said. “This is finally a tool I can use to fight back.”
Doctors are turning to the technology even as some of the country’s largest insurance companies face class-action lawsuits alleging that they used their own technology to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut off seriously ill patients from rehabilitation treatment.
Some experts fear that the prior-authorization process will soon devolve into an A.I. “arms race,” in which bots battle bots over insurance coverage. Among doctors, there are few things as universally hated.
“If you want to see a physician go apoplectic at a cocktail party, mention prior authorizations,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco.The process was designed by insurance companies to keep health care costs down by reining in doctors’ use of unnecessary and expensive treatments.