As medical knowledge grows exponentially, clinicians are faced with the challenge of navigating and making sense of it all. It’s time to admit that students and doctors alike need to strategically adapt to the increasing demands of the times to learn and integrate information into practice as efficiently as possible.
So what does AI look like in medical education, currently? In this digital age, medical students are more tech-savvy and many enjoy using online learning platforms, educational videos, and assisted learning through chatbots and online quizzes. AI provides personalized and adaptive learning experiences by analyzing feedback from students. This helps identify gaps in knowledge and adjust to each student’s individual needs. All this will be discussed in the rest of the article, but first let’s discuss why AI has a place in medical education:
Why AI Matters in Medical Education
The first published study about AI’s use in medical education was back in 1992 and the development of AI can be dated as far back as the 1940s. But the years onwards from 2018 have seen a rapid growth in the use of AI systems in educational institutions. However, in a study done across two medical universities in Beijing, many students are familiar with AI concepts, but less than half understand its place in medical education. Much of the hesitancy for its use is due to the privacy and ethical risks it may pose. Despite AI’s significant role in modern technology, it still has a long way to go in this field.
However, as mentioned prior, there is a burden placed on students and doctors to master years and years of medical knowledge, while keeping up-to-date with the current best practices. To ease this challenge, AI can provide a way to assist educators and students in integrating data into their learning experiences. Here are some effective tools that make use of AI:
Types of AI Tools and Their Practical Benefits
AI Chatbots:
The use of AI chatbots has been increasing in popularity. One common example is ChatGPT. Chatbots can serve as interactive tutors for students, generating digestible outlines for learning and breaking down difficult concepts. Some have been used to automate tasks such as transcribing lectures, creating flashcards, making mnemonics and memory aids, and generating table summaries, which would otherwise be time-consuming for students.
For educators, they can use AI to create comprehensive yet effective lesson plans or formulate questions using Lecturio’s AI Plan Generator and Question Generator. This allows the educator to simply read over the content and edit as they see fit. This makes AI chatbots a great complement to the curriculum as teachers can focus on their role of guiding students.
Adaptive Learning Platforms:
Adaptive Learning refers to the educational approach of tailoring the teaching strategies towards individual students. It’s important to note that not all teachers in the faculty are full-time, and some are full-time doctors who make the time to teach. As a result, sometimes individualistic teaching styles fall through. This is especially true when time is limited or faculty-to-student ratios are insufficient. The use of AI acts as an interactive tutor for medical students, filtering through topics where a student would have the most trouble, such as Lecturio’s AI Tutor feature. AI can even find resources that works best for the student, catering to their own learning strengths.
AI-Powered Spaced Repetition Systems:
Spaced repetition is a tried and proven way to study that works for many students. Flashcards are one way to practice this, and many use applications. While not all applications use AI features, there are third-party applications that generate flashcards using AI. Meanwhile, Lecturio also uses spaced repetition similar to flashcards, using an algorithm that is also tailored to a students’ performance.
Virtual Patient Simulations (Healer by Lecturio):
Virtual patients provide an opportunity for students to learn by experience without the real-life consequences. While a controlled environment has a few differences from actual practice, it allows students to build confident decision-making and enhanced communication skills. This minimizes mistakes and improves clinical outcomes by the time students finally work face-to-face with real patients.
An example of this is Lecturio’s Healer which simulates the whole patient-care process behind the convenience and safety of a computer screen. It guides students from the initial assessment to the diagnostic stage to the treatment and long-term management of various patient cases. This program guides students through systematic clinical reasoning models with the goal of preparing competent and job-ready doctors.
Maximizing the Benefits of AI Tools
Integrating AI chatbots with Active Recall and Spaced Repetition
Active recall involves retrieving information from memory effectively. Real, retained learning comes from practicing this again and again– which is where spaced repetition comes in. This can be done using AI chatbots to generate flashcards, making studying more efficient for students, saving time to cover more topics.
For example, Lecturio has an AI feature that can generate learning plans tailored to the individual goals of the students while also bringing up relevant resources like videos, quizzes, and reference summaries. This goes beyond simply reading and highlighting– it’s about providing a systematic way to learn based on the student’s pace and learning style.
The AI Tutor feature is also another example of AI that guides students by helping them come to the correct answer. This means that if you’re having trouble with a question on Lecturio, you can open the AI Tutor to give you a hint. If your answer is incorrectly, the program will offer another hint to guide you to a different answer.
Best practices for using AI to complement study
It’s important to remember that AI is not a replacement for traditional studying methods, but an enhancement. While it makes life easier, all the effort to read textbooks and verify information still relies on the student. AI cannot read your lessons for you, nor is it the one directly treating your patients. Instead, think of AI as a way to make lessons more digestible.
For example, when generating flashcards or questions using AI, refine the information with parts of your lesson or points that were emphasized during class. Use information from your class notes, textbooks, or lecture slides. There will be some information that professors specifically say will be on the exam. So don’t forget to pay attention in class as well!
Another way to use AI is to know what kind of teaching works for you. Not all students have the same learning style. You can use AI to find effective resources that cater to your visual, audio, or mixed learning styles for difficult topics. You can also use it to come up with mnemonics and memory aids for various topics that you have a hard time memorizing.
Managing the Risks and Limitations of AI in Education
With all the benefits AI can provide, using it comes with some risks and limitations that students and educators need to be vigilant about. Some of these risks and limitations include, but are not limited to:
Academic Integrity
With the advancement of AI, it has developed to emulate human behavior and language. Due to the increase in students using AI to write their assignments, many have their academic integrity called into question. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between genuine work and AI-generated content without the use of a third-party application.
Instead, educators should be encouraged to explore other alternatives to assess their students’ understanding. This includes oral exams, assignments requiring hand-drawn diagrams, or having students present their work and expound on it.
Factual Hallucinations
When using AI, it’s best to keep an eye out for AI hallucinations. These are when the information being fed from the AI chatbot are inaccurate or outright false. Often, chatbots have cited fake resources because AI is trained through language patterns, not reading scholarly journals. They cannot search for literature for you.
Due to this limitation, it’s best to double check the information that AI bots feed you. You should also avoid using it for purposes it wasn’t designed for. This includes finding sources on specific topics, writing your literature reviews, or creating predictions based on trends. You can, however, use it to generate ideas, make writing suggestions, summarize information that you feed it, etc. But even then, it’s best that you do your own research and always double check the legitimacy of the information it gives.
Privacy
Another ethical consideration that concerns some students is data protection. Since AI tools make use of massive amounts of data to learn, interactions from users could expose personal data. Throughout the evolution of AI chatbots, information has been collected without transparency or even user consent. This information can be prone to unauthorized access, data breaches, or even misuse.
When using AI for studying, avoid divulging any personal information. All students really need is their topic information and not much else when they use AI to study. If you do upload information onto an AI chatbot, make sure to remove any identifiers towards you or others. Avoid uploading someone else’s work on an AI chatbot. Lastly, when using AI tools, always check the settings if there are any features that involve sharing sensitive data and turn it off.
Future Trends: Emerging AI Features
With how things are going, it seems like the future of medical education will be augmented by the use of AI technologies to assist teachers in managing their lessons better. The use of AI can buy teachers more time to attend to their students’ individual needs. Hopefully with further research and development, AI comes closer to being as error-free and transparent with data security as possible.
AI patient simulations continue to revolutionize the way students in the classroom-setting can experience actual practice by simulating complex cases and more realistic scenarios. This can help reduce both cost and time usually spent with traditional training methods.
Conclusion & Next Steps
So in this article we discussed the importance of the use of AI in medical education, some learning strategies using AI, the limitations of its use (and how to use it responsibly), and what may come in the future. Of course, it’s up to the student to work with this information and consider if using AI is the best strategy for them.
If you want to get started with integrating AI in your learning or teaching strategies, Lecturio has several, advanced AI-powered resources that students can use:
- Healer – an application that teaches trains students in clinical reasoning through patient simulations
- AI Tutor – gives hints to guide students to the correct answer when asked a question on the learning platform
- AI Assistant – searches the Lecturio content library for relevant and useful resources to any medical and nursing question
- AI Lesson Plan Generator – builds a lesson plan for educators based on the topic, preferred lesson length, language, delivery method, and specialty
- AI Question Generator – creates multiple-choice questions from specific topics and learning objectives that can be customized as needed
If you’re unsure about using AI in your studies, that’s fine. AI is just one of the many ways you can enrich your study sessions. It has its pros and cons, but with its increasing presence in medical education, it may be beneficial to at least familiarize yourself with its uses and precautions. If anything, it’s definitely something worth trying!
