How AI is quietly rewriting the rules of modern medicine

From diagnosing rare conditions to improving the patient experience, AI is transforming how we practice medicine.

In the podcast series "The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited," Microsoft Research President Peter Lee sits down with experts across health and life sciences to explore all the ways AI is changing the game. Lee and his guests walk through how AI can make simple improvements to clinical experiences today - like taking notes during doctor visits, helping patients take a more active role in their care and even accelerating development of new drugs.

Here are some of the takeaways from Lee and his guests about how AI is changing healthcare.

1. AI can help strengthen the human connection between doctors and their patients

AI can not only help generate high-quality answers to patient messages but can also convey "a tremendous amount of empathy," Dr. Christopher Longhurst explains in Episode 1.

Longhurst, chief clinical and innovation officer at University of California San Diego Health , says doctors want to give thoughtful responses to patients' questions and that AI can help them draft a starting point more quickly - helping clinicians respond efficiently while still preserving the human touch.

"We saw that the responses were two to three times longer, on average, and they carried a more empathetic tone," Longhurst says. "And our physicians told us it decreased cognitive burden."

2. AI can catch mistakes

AI can be used as a "second set of eyes" to help catch errors like the wrong medication dose. In Episode 4, Dr. Roxana Daneshjou, assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford University, recounts a personal story about receiving an after-visit summary with an incorrect dose of Tylenol for her child.

"I, as a physician, knew that this dose was a mistake," she says. She asked AI if there were any errors in the summary, "and it clued in that the dose of the medication was wrong."

3. AI could increase access to healthcare in underserved regions

AI could play a pivotal role when no doctor is available. In Episode 7, Microsoft co-founder and Gates Foundation Chair Bill Gates explains we need to ensure that in lower-income countries, "there isn't some lag" in their adaptation of AI-led healthcare.

"I think whether it's India or Africa, there'll be lessons that are globally valuable because we need medical intelligence," he explains. "And, you know, thank God AI is going to provide a lot of that."

4. AI could start to blur boundaries between medical fields

AI could help break down the walls between medical specialties, as Lee and Dr. Morgan Cheatham, resident physician at Boston Children's Hospital, discuss in Episode 9: The idea that while specialists may focus on specific things - nephrologists on kidneys, for example - responses from large language models can have a more expansive view.

" I'm interested in this question of whether medical specialties themselves need to evolve," Cheatham says. "And if we look back in the history of medical technology, there are many times where a new technology forced a medical specialty to evolve."

5. AI is accelerating drug development

In Episode 8, Lee and his guests discuss how AI is playing a growing role in identifying new drug targets and how the technology can help improve the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

"It may fundamentally change the way we think about how to do science," explains Noubar Afeyan, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and co-founder and chairman of Moderna .

Listen to the podcast series from "The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited" homepage or on Apple Podcasts , Android or Spotify .

Lead image: Microsoft Research President Peter Lee(front, fourth from the left) surrounded by guests on "The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited" podcast. (Illustration by Tetiana Bukhinska and David Celis Garcia)