Medical schools are missing the mark on artificial intelligence

Ready or not, health care is undergoing a massive transformation driven by artificial intelligence. But medical schools have barely started to teach about AI and machine learning -- creating knowledge gaps that could compound the damage caused by flawed algorithms and biased decision-support systems. "We're going to be at a point where we're not going to be able to catch up and be able to call out the technology defects or flaws," said Erkin Ötleş, a machine learning researcher working toward his medical degree and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. "Without being armed with that set of foundational knowledge into how these things work, we're going to be at a disadvantage." In a recent commentary published in Cell Reports Medicine, Ötleş and a group of physicians and educators from the University of Michigan called for medical educators to make AI less of an afterthought and more of a core concept in undergraduate medical training.