The first hospital without doctors or nurses was designed to be run entirely by artificial intelligence.
Can AI be used to help healthcare? This is what is taking shape in China in this hospital without doctors or nurses. Agent Hospital, developed by researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing, will be the first medical facility run entirely by artificial intelligence. It will employ virtual healthcare specialists generated by AI.
How will it work? Patients will go to an interface where they will be supported by an AI. It will be able to reproduce different medical scenarios such as disease diagnoses or treatments to prescribe, thanks to a vast repository of medical knowledge. According to evaluations, the accuracy of AI for these tasks is 93.06%. This would represent a team of 14 doctors and 4 nurses with the capacity to take care of 3000 patients per day, which a traditional hospital cannot achieve with a similar workforce. Virtual doctors will be focused on diagnosis and treatments and nursing robots on daily support.
The goal is also to train medical students by simulating patients using AI, removing the fear of harming real patients during the years of medical training. Liu Yang, head of the Agent Hospital research team, told the Global Timesthat “the AI hospital city is poised to transform the way doctors diagnose and treat patients, bringing immense benefits to healthcare professionals and the general public.”
The promise of AI is not just economic. The designers of this very special hospital believe that artificial intelligence will save patients themselves time, with faster diagnoses and earlier treatments. “The potential for high-quality, affordable and convenient healthcare services for the public is there. It is becoming more and more real as the diagnostic capabilities of AI doctors evolve from the virtual to the real world,” Liu Yang added.
The system should be operational in the second half of 2024. However, it will not replace traditional hospitals, if only because each case of illness is unique and uncertainty is the norm. The human capacity to manage the unexpected and to personalize care remains essential. The same goes for direct contact with patients who feel the need.