AI recommends vastly more expensive treatment than physicians, analysis suggests

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems suggest medical tests and treatment plans that are more than three times as expensive as those recommended by doctors, a study has found.1A small head-to-head evaluation by Israeli and US researchers analysed how 24 AI systems responded to 200 real outpatient and emergency department clinical notes.These notes were sourced from MTSamples, a public collection of deidentified US format clinical notes contributed by practising clinicians.Each AI system received the notes as they were recorded by the treating physician. The AI then produced its own assessment and plan, which was compared with the physician’s plan documented in the original notes.Orders from both plans were priced at 2026 Medicare rates. New medicines were counted rather than priced.Publishing their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine,1 the researchers found that the primary reason AI treatment plans were more expensive was because the algorithms suggested more diagnostic tests, medications, and…