AI’s Emerging Role in Medical Education
Across the country, medical schools are cautiously integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into their curricula. These tools offer promising new avenues for enhancing education, from generating practice quizzes to simulating patient interactions. While AI’s potential is vast, faculty are emphasizing the critical need for human oversight to ensure these technologies are used effectively and ethically. This article will explore several ways AI is impacting medical education, highlighting specific examples from institutions like the University of Minnesota Medical School and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Building clinical skills
One area experiencing significant change is the development of clinical skills. Traditionally, students practice these skills with standardized patients, who are trained to present specific symptoms and medical histories. This process requires considerable time, resources, and staff. Furthermore, there is variability among observers, even when objective criteria are used.
AI is now being used to create standardized patients, answering questions and evaluating student interactions. The AI tool is trained on the standards of the Objective Structured Clinical Examination assessment tool.
Evaluating students for residency applications
The Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE) is a vital document for students applying for residency programs. Creating this evaluation, which summarizes a student’s academic performance and attributes, requires a combination of faculty input and administrative oversight. The process is time-consuming, and it requires a dedicated effort from faculty and staff, requiring assessments from multiple faculty members.
At the Miller SOM, an AI tool summarizes narrative assessments, which professors use to create the formal evaluation in a fraction of the time. The AI summaries are then reviewed by the professor and, in turn, reviewed by the student, and the final decision is made by the team.
Creating questions for test preparation
Creating effective test questions is challenging, and many students rely on costly external test preparation services. The UC College of Medicine developed an AI tool that analyzes course content and generates USMLE-style study questions, along with explanations for the correct answers. This is designed to provide more accessible and affordable study materials for students. The human feedback is uploaded into the AI system so that it can learn to improve its generated questions and responses.
Helping students improve
Some professors are using AI to draft course quizzes, which are then reviewed by the professors before being assigned to students. The program generates quizzes, grades them, and further generates new quizzes for the student, focusing on material that causes them trouble.
The future of AI in medical education
As these examples demonstrate, AI is poised to play a larger role in medical education. However, faculty stress that these new tools supplement human expertise, rather than replace it. The human component is viewed as paramount, needing to be protected with the highest level of scrutiny.
