The Pros & Cons of AI

CHICAGO—Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing more and more sophisticated for use in rheumatology and the medical field, offering clinicians a staggering number of options for how to potentially deploy it. From aiding diagnosis to prior authorizations to clinical trial recruitment, AI can help common, simple tasks be completed quickly, ease the cognitive demand of more challenging work and perform tasks that would be impossible if not for AI, said Jeff Curtis, MD, endowed professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in a session at ACR Convergence 2025.

In a counterargument during the session, Jinoos Yazdany, MD, MPH, endowed professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, warned that AI, although helpful, is rife with issues of increasing bias in the practice of medicine, meager regulatory oversight and a lack of transparency.

How AI Is Being Used in Medicine

Jeffrey Curtis, MD, MS, MPH

OpenEvidence, an AI-enabled medical search platform, is one of the most used AI tools, and typically performs quite well, Dr. Curtis said.

“You can just ask [about] a patient’s scenario, and it gives you both clinical reasoning and literature search,” he said. “It rarely hallucinates what that literature is,” unlike other large language models. However, it still does occasionally hallucinate both the prompt and the response, he added.

“AI is not necessarily artificial intelligence as much as augmented intelligence—it reminds you of things that you probably already knew and would have eventually thought of but can be very helpful as your thought partner,” Dr. Curtis said.

AI tools can help process prior authorizations. But this kind of tool is best integrated with the electronic medical records so that information, such as ICD10 codes, indications and treatment history, can be extracted.

He warned that “of course insurance companies are using it AI against us, and they have much deeper pockets.” He noted a class-action suit against Cigna for its use of AI for quick denials, but he held out hope for a “more rational AI system that has fair balance to reflect all stakeholder views.” Thus, suggesting that the fear of big legal settlements may motivate insurance companies to come to the table.

AI can also be used to help put together clinical trials, evaluating eligibility criteria, defining cohorts, designing studies and recruiting patients.

Physicians have also found AI helpful for drafting reponses to portal messages from patients, Dr. Curtis said. One randomized trial actually found that an AI tool did not save time on this task due to the time needed to review the AI responses. However, physicians still tended to like the tool, in part because—at the end of a long day—it can be hard to be empathetic when responding to patient queries, and AI can help draft suitable responses, Dr. Curtis said.¹