AI won’t take the place of radiologists but will help fill gaps amid an ongoing shortage of the providers, a health system CEO told Becker’s.
David Lubarsky, president and CEO of Valhalla, N.Y.-based Westchester Medical Center Health Network, recently spoke at a forum discussing how safety-net health systems could contend with the dearth of radiologists on top of rising cost pressures.
The resulting headlines insinuated that health system CEOs are ready to replace radiologists with AI. But Dr. Lubarsky said those stories misconstrued what was discussed at the event.
“What was actually said is that in low-risk patients who have an essentially negative scan, AI can read that correctly 99.97% of the time, as good as a radiologist,” he said during an April interview at Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting in Chicago. “So therefore you could redirect limited radiology labor to really important things like carefully reviewing high-risk patients’ scans.”
Fears of mass AI job displacement exist across industries, not just healthcare, but Dr. Lubarsky envisions the technology only augmenting the work of physicians and other clinicians — and never supplanting the human touch of medical professionals.
“You can never substitute the patient-physician or patient-nurse partnerships in their care, the human compassion and concern, or frankly, an understanding of an individual’s unique circumstances, which really can only be processed by people with that emotional capacity, which are human beings,” he said.
But supplementing tasks — particularly those that involve “simple pattern recognition” — with AI makes financial sense too, Dr. Lubarsky said.
“We always talk about the cost of care exploding,” he said. “Well, it’s very expensive to hire a radiologist to do something that in a specific set of circumstances — low-risk patient, negative scan — can be done just as well with a computer evaluation as a human evaluation,” he said. “Why pay a ton of money for that when you can pay the money to get them to really look at the scans where their expertise is invaluable and irreplaceable?”
Besides, Dr. Lubarsky said, you can’t oust radiologists when you don’t have enough to begin with, which is particularly true at safety-net organizations like his.
“We are not getting rid of a single radiologist, just for the record,” he said. “But, boy, do we turn away a bunch of exams, frankly, to our competitors, so we don’t have enough people to do all the work.”
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