4.3 The risk of deskilling

Deskill may occur due to reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

When considering workforce transformation in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, it is important to address the risk of deskilling³³ of the clinical workforce due to reliance on AI technologies³⁴ for tasks previously undertaken by clinicians.

Deskilling could affect non-experts, who may defer to AI when completing tasks outside of their area of expertise, as well as experts, who may be unable to maintain and enhance their own clinical judgement skills and confidence if they come to depend on AI technologies.

The risk of deskilling should be considered when AI technologies are deployed in healthcare settings, including through taking appropriate actions to safeguard clinical expertise.³⁵ This is likely to depend on careful AI product design, such as considering the way in which information is displayed to users. It will also depend on cautious integration of products into clinical pathways; for example, considering when AI technologies are used in a workflow and whether clinicians are ‘blinded’ to AI outputs when making their own clinical assessments. It may be appropriate that a proportion of cases are handled manually both to retain skills and to allow on-going monitoring of the AI against human performance on current clinical data.

It will be important that all workforce archetypes are aware of the risk of deskilling so it can be mitigated at all levels. It will be essential for Drivers to understand this risk so they can ensure pathways and procedures are in place within local settings to monitor and minimise deskilling.

References

³³ Duran L.D.D. Deskilling of medical professionals: an unintended consequence of AI implementation? Giornale di Filosofia. 2021. 2.

³⁴ Sambasivan N, Veeraraghavan R. The Deskilling of Domain Expertise in AI Development. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 587, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517578 

³⁵ Aquino YSJ, Rogers W, Braunack-Mayer A, Frazer H, Win K, Houssami N, Degeling C, Semsarian C, Carter S. Professional Perspectives on the Impact of Healthcare Artificial Intelligence on Clinical Roles and Skills. 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4129747  Accessed June 7, 2022.