What we generally refer to as “artificial intelligence” in everyday life has many modes of operation and fields of application. A wide variety of AI systems have also been used routinely in medicine for a long time. They support medical professionals in taking medical histories and making diagnoses, or in the operating room, by supplementing the individual expertise and experience of human experts with statistical analyses and—based on these—recommendations for action. Doctors can use these various sources of information to address the specific needs of their patients individually and provide them with the best possible care. Today, however, it is not only AI products developed specifically for everyday medical practice that play a role; AI systems are also available to patients—mostly in the form of chatbots that simulate human communication and thus reinforce the impression that one is dealing with a system that is “intelligent” in the human sense and can also be consulted regarding medical issues. The hype surrounding these systems has created high expectations regarding medical care: Can “AI”—which is beginning to replace staff in so many other areas and promises increased efficiency—also be a solution to the shortage of medical professionals?
Dr. Oswald Hasselmann is a specialist in pediatrics and adolescent medicine with a focus on neurology; he is a member of the management team at the Eastern Switzerland Children’s Hospital and president of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics. In this Digitalgespräch, the expert on ethical values in the medical professions explains where popular systems like ChatGPT appear in everyday medical practice, how medical AI products are used, what new forms of knowledge are emerging as a result, and how realistic the expectations are that the medical community, policymakers, and patients have for these technologies. Together with hosts Petra Gehring and Marlene Görger, Hasselmann discusses the implications of the normalization of AI use for the competence and responsibility of medical professionals, which new aspects should therefore be incorporated into medical education and continuing education—and whether we must give up the privacy of our health data to support the use of commercial AI products in medical care.
Episode 65 of Digitalgespräch with Oswald Hasselmann of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics,3rd of June 2025
Further Information:
To the webseite of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics: https://www.bioethics.ch/sgbe/
all episodes of Digitalgespräch
The podcast is in German. At the moment there is no English version or transcript available.