How do medical professionals make sense (or not) of AI? A social-media-based computational grounded theory study and an online survey

Abstract

To investigate opinions and attitudes of medical professionals towards adopting AI-enabled healthcare technologies in their daily business, we used a mixed-methods approach. Study 1 employed a qualitative computational grounded theory approach analyzing 181 Reddit threads in the several subreddits of r/medicine. By utilizing an unsupervised machine learning clustering method, we identified three key themes: (1) consequences of AI, (2) physician-AI relationship, and (3) a proposed way forward. In particular Reddit posts related to the first two themes indicated that the medical professionals' fear of being replaced by AI and skepticism toward AI played a major role in the argumentations. Moreover, the results suggest that this fear is driven by little or moderate knowledge about AI. Posts related to the third theme focused on factual discussions about how AI and medicine have to be designed to become broadly adopted in health care. Study 2 quantitatively examined the relationship between the fear of AI, knowledge about AI, and medical professionals' intention to use AI-enabled technologies in more detail. Results based on a sample of 223 medical professionals who participated in the online survey revealed that the intention to use AI technologies increases with increasing knowledge about AI and that this effect is moderated by the fear of being replaced by AI.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence (AI); Job-replacement anxiety; Medical AI; Medical professionals; Social media analysis; Technology acceptance.

Graphical abstract

Fig. 1

Research process of study 1.

Fig. 2

Interaction effects. AI knowledge by AI Anxiety (job-replacement). Note. Areas around the graphs indicate 95% confidence intervals. Points represent actual data, color of the points indicates AI knowledge.

Fig. 3

Interaction effects. AI knowledge by AI Anxiety (sociotechnical blindness). Note. Areas around the graphs indicate 95% confidence intervals. Points represent actual data, color of the points indicates AI knowledge.