An AI system flagged early signs of retinopathy. The doctor dismissed it. The AI was right.
Moments like this are becoming common in medicine, raising a harder question: when man and machine don’t agree, who should?
AI is proving sharper in some tasks, but it can’t comfort a patient. Neither can it explain trade-offs, nor carry the weight of trust. It’s a hassle figuring out how the two can work together.
In this piece, 11 healthcare leaders share the changes needed to strike that balance. All experts answered a simple question: how can AI support care without replacing the human heart of it?
- Train Physicians as AI Interpreters
- Integrate AI Literacy into Medical Education
- Implement AI-Assisted Triage in Healthcare
- Redefine Physicians as Expert AI Guides
- Establish Mandatory AI-Physician Collaboration Protocols
- Create Federated AI Validation Networks
- Enhance Physician-AI Interaction and Training
- Prioritize Relational Competence in Medical Education
- Optimize AI for Efficient Patient Consultations
- Balance AI Diagnosis with Human Communication
- Maintain Human-Centric Care with AI Support
Train Physicians as AI Interpreters
A few months ago, we implemented an AI-powered diagnostic tool for early-stage diabetic retinopathy detection. Its accuracy exceeded our clinicians in borderline cases with over 94% sensitivity. Naturally, that raised eyebrows. Some physicians felt sidelined, while others worried about legal risks in trusting or overriding the AI’s results.
One case stood out: a physician overruled the AI’s detection of stage I retinopathy. It turned out the AI was correct, and we caught the miss just in time during a secondary review. No harm was done, but it sparked a necessary shift in how we approach physician training. Rather than just teaching how to diagnose, we began teaching how to interpret and challenge AI.
The result? A structured diagnostic review protocol and joint decision-making process led to a 22% reduction in diagnostic discrepancies and faster case resolutions by 18%. More importantly, clinicians felt empowered rather than displaced.
My advice? Teach your people how to work with the machine, not against it. Training should include AI interpretation, understanding model limitations, and when to override. Liability frameworks must also evolve: think shared accountability with clear audit trails and explainable outputs, not binary blame.
If you’re outside healthcare but implementing AI decisions, say in finance, logistics, or HR, the principle still holds: when machines lead, humans need to steer differently. Re-skill your people to become interpreters, not just operators.
The future isn’t human vs. AI; it’s human + AI. But we need to train humans for that “+” role now.
John Russo, VP of Healthcare Technology Solutions, OSP Labs
Integrate AI Literacy into Medical Education
As AI diagnostic tools surpass human accuracy in certain specialties, one critical change healthcare systems must implement is integrating AI literacy and ethical judgment training into medical education and ongoing physician development. Rather than viewing AI as a competitor, physicians should be trained as “clinical translators” who interpret AI insights through the lens of human experience, context, and empathy. This ensures that the final decision still rests in the physician’s hands, but with smarter support.
At the same time, liability frameworks need an overhaul, clearly defining where accountability lies when AI recommendations influence outcomes. Transparent AI documentation, co-signed decisions, and patient communication protocols must be standardized. By proactively educating both physicians and patients on the collaborative nature of AI in care, we not only preserve trust but strengthen it, anchoring efficiency in a foundation of shared responsibility and informed, human-led guidance.
Umayr Azimi, MD, Medical Director, MI Express Urgent & Primary Care
Implement AI-Assisted Triage in Healthcare
As AI diagnostic tools become more accurate and widely adopted, one of the most effective ways to improve healthcare workflows is through AI-assisted triage. Rather than replacing physicians, AI should support decision-making, streamline efficiency, and enhance clinical training while keeping human oversight central.
By applying AI in the early stages of diagnosis, computer vision and machine learning models can quickly analyze data and identify cases with high confidence levels. This allows physicians to prioritize urgent or ambiguous cases while deferring lower-risk ones for later review, improving accuracy and reducing cognitive load.
This setup fosters mutual learning. Clinicians improve their skills by reviewing AI-flagged results, while their feedback trains the AI, creating a continuous learning loop. Both the physician and the technology become more effective through real-world use.
To implement this responsibly, updates to legal and procedural frameworks are essential. When AI influences care decisions, liability must be clearly shared. Validated systems, clinician oversight, and transparent protocols help ensure accountability while preserving safety and trust.
Patient communication is equally important. People should know when AI is part of their diagnostic process and be reassured that final decisions remain with licensed professionals. Transparency strengthens trust in both the care team and the technology.
AI-assisted triage offers real benefits: improved efficiency, better clinical focus, and stronger diagnostic outcomes. With thoughtful integration and clear safeguards, AI can enhance healthcare without replacing human judgment at its core.
Steven Mitts, CEO/Co-Founder, Full Spectrum Imaging
Redefine Physicians as Expert AI Guides
Healthcare systems must redefine the physician’s core function from being the primary diagnostician to becoming the expert interpreter and human context guide for AI-generated insights. The future of medicine isn’t a battle between doctors and machines; it’s about creating a powerful partnership. While an AI may be able to identify a complex disease pattern from a scan with superhuman accuracy, it cannot sit with a patient, understand their life’s story, and explain what that diagnosis means for them, their family, and their future.
This shift directly impacts training and liability. Medical education must prioritize “human skills” — empathetic communication, navigating ambiguity, and collaborative decision-making — as central competencies. Liability should then judge not just the data’s accuracy, but the physician’s wisdom in interpreting that data and co-creating a treatment plan with the patient.
Think of the AI as a hyper-advanced GPS. It can show the most efficient route, but only the human driver, in conversation with their passenger, can decide if the scenic route is better. This preserves the physician’s irreplaceable value and builds trust, ensuring technology serves the human relationship at the heart of healing.
Ishdeep Narang, MD, Child, Adolescent & Adult Psychiatrist | Founder, ACES Psychiatry, Orlando, Florida
Establish Mandatory AI-Physician Collaboration Protocols
Healthcare systems need to implement mandatory AI-physician collaboration protocols that standardize how doctors review and challenge AI recommendations before acting on them. In my 17 years of treating chronic pain, I’ve learned that the most dangerous medical decisions happen when we stop questioning our tools.
I saw this when treating a veteran with refractory nerve pain. An AI system flagged his case for aggressive opioid reduction based on population data, but my clinical assessment revealed he was actually a candidate for peripheral nerve stimulation. The AI missed contextual factors like his specific injury pattern and previous failed treatments. Without a formal protocol requiring me to document why I disagreed with the AI recommendation, that patient might have suffered unnecessarily.
The liability framework should require physicians to explicitly document when they override AI suggestions and their clinical reasoning. This creates a paper trail that protects both doctors and patients while maintaining human judgment as the final authority. When I’ve published research on responsible opioid prescribing, the cases with the best outcomes always involved physicians who combined data insights with individualized clinical reasoning.
Most importantly, patients need to understand that AI is assisting their doctor, not replacing them. I tell patients upfront when AI tools inform my treatment planning, and I explain how I’m using that information alongside my clinical experience. This transparency actually increases trust because patients see the technology as an improvement to human expertise rather than a replacement.
Paul Lynch, CEO, US Pain Care
Create Federated AI Validation Networks
The biggest gap isn’t in AI accuracy — it’s in data interoperability when AI recommendations hit real-world care delivery. The one change we need is federated AI validation networks where multiple health systems can verify diagnostic recommendations without sharing raw patient data.
At Lifebit, we built our Trusted Data Lakehouse specifically for this challenge using OMOP data harmonization. When our federal genomics partners run AI diagnostics, the recommendations are validated against anonymized data from 12+ institutions simultaneously. This caught 18% more edge cases than single-system AI training while maintaining complete patient privacy.
The liability framework should shift toward “federated confidence scores” — where AI tools show not just their diagnostic confidence, but how that recommendation performed across similar patient populations in other systems. At Thrive, when we integrated behavioral health screening tools with this approach, our false positive rate dropped 31% because physicians could see real validation data, not just algorithmic certainty.
For physician training, we need “AI reasoning audits” built into residency programs. Doctors should regularly review cases where federated networks flagged AI recommendations as outliers, learning to spot when algorithms miss population-level patterns that only cross-institutional data can reveal.
Nate Raine, CEO, Thrive
Enhance Physician-AI Interaction and Training
The world is revolving around AI, and this is a significant advantage, especially in healthcare. However, physicians need to stay on top of their game to ensure better outcomes and also gain trust from patients. Adequate training and re-training of physicians on AI models, how to interpret data, when to rely on AI, and how to fine-tune answers are important.
While AI is used everywhere, physicians need to learn not to be overly reliant on these models. They should use them but make sure they have the final call or decision, whichever the case may be. Overreliance can lead to trust issues with patients, and it’s best if the doctor uses this tool as supportive technology, just like confirming a diagnosis with ultrasound scans.
Austin Anadu, Doctor, AlynMD
Prioritize Relational Competence in Medical Education
Re-engineer training so that “people skills” become the new hard skills.
When AI can out-diagnose a clinician on pattern-recognition tasks (dermatology images, retinal scans, early sepsis flags), the physician’s irreplaceable value shifts from knowing to connecting. Health systems should therefore recast the curriculum and incentive structures around relational competence:
1. Make Empathy a Graded, Longitudinal Competency
Embed simulated and real-world encounters that are scored on active listening, shared-decision phrasing, and cultural humility, not simply on getting the differential right. Use standardized-patient feedback and even natural language processing audits of clinic notes to coach tone, bias, and clarity.
2. Teach “Explainability” Alongside Diagnostics
Residents should learn to translate an AI model’s risk score into patient-friendly narratives and to recognize when a recommendation clashes with lived values or psychosocial context. That’s what makes us human.
3. Cultivate Team Emotional Intelligence
Rounds should include debriefs on communication breakdowns or microaggressions, not just case metrics. Psychological safety enables nurses, technicians, and physicians to challenge questionable AI suggestions.
4. Rebalance Performance Incentives
Tie a portion of compensation and promotion to patient-reported measures of respect, clarity, and trust. What gets measured gets mastered.
In short, yesterday’s currency was encyclopedic recall; tomorrow’s is relational fluency. By formally teaching, assessing, and rewarding empathy and communication, rather than assuming they’re “soft” extras of a CV, healthcare systems keep humans in the loop where we matter most: translating data into compassionate, trust-building care.
Julio Baute, Medical Doctor, Invigor Medical
Optimize AI for Efficient Patient Consultations
As AI diagnostic systems begin outperforming human physicians in select diagnostic areas, it’s critical that healthcare systems evolve in tandem, not only to optimize clinical efficiency but to safeguard trust and human oversight.
One important change I’d recommend is the integration of AI literacy into medical education and ongoing professional development. Physicians don’t need to become data scientists, but they must be trained to understand how AI systems arrive at their conclusions, how to interpret algorithmic recommendations within clinical context, and how to spot when those outputs may be flawed or biased. Without this foundational understanding, physicians may either over-rely on AI or dismiss it entirely, both of which can compromise patient care.
To address legal concerns and patient safety, liability frameworks should shift toward shared accountability between healthcare providers and AI tool developers. Transparency in model validation, scope of use, and limitations must be standardized, so clinicians are not left vulnerable to decisions made based on opaque algorithms.
Ultimately, the physician-patient relationship is built on empathy and trust, two qualities that AI cannot replicate. AI should assist, not replace. Ensuring that patients still receive human explanation and emotional support, even when AI tools are part of the diagnostic process, will be essential to preserving confidence in modern medicine.
Dr Shamsa Kanwal, Medical Doctor and Consultant Dermatologist, myHSteam
Balance AI Diagnosis with Human Communication
I believe that AI is a magnificent tool that can be used from now on for the training of new generations of physicians. I see it as an advancement in education and not as a rival to the profession.
That said, I believe that the amount of academic activities during medical school and later in the residency program makes interaction with patients poor in the sense of not dedicating the necessary time to each one, sometimes generating mistrust on the part of the patient.
I believe that a more student-friendly system could be created, optimizing the work tools by adding AI not only to corroborate diagnoses or treatments but also to make consultations more dynamic and efficient with better communication. In this way, human control will be maintained, which ultimately provides the comfort that the patient needs with the certainty of a proper diagnosis and treatment.
Maybell Nieves, Surgical Oncologist, AlynMD
Maintain Human-Centric Care with AI Support
No amount of advanced technology will replace the most powerful care, which is still based on communication. I’ve observed that patients want to be heard, understood, and involved in their care. As AI becomes more prevalent in diagnosis and treatment, clinicians need to remain in charge of communication and decision-making.
Education should extend beyond teaching how to use AI; it needs to instruct clinicians on how to explain how the technology works and how it applies to a particular patient. This kind of transparency is crucial, especially in cases where a patient is considering complex or expensive treatment options. Malpractice rules also need to be updated. Clinicians shouldn’t be penalized for using their judgment to modify or reject an AI recommendation when it’s in the best interest of the patient.
The intended result is more precise and efficient care, but not less human. This is only possible when healthcare systems support the provider-patient relationship as the primary driver of care, with AI serving as an assistant rather than taking the lead.
Dr. Kristy Gretzula, Dentist/Owner, Hawley Lane Dental
Learning The Balance That Matters
Across these 11 changes, one truth holds: AI can make care faster. But only people can make it feel human.
Doctors can’t be replaced. But they can step into emerging roles as interpreters and guides. To do that well, we need to rethink training, accountability, and what we reward in care.
AI should sharpen your tools and help us achieve more. Getting that balance right is true progress.