Researchers Are Exploring How AI Could Help with End-of-Life Decisions

A new AI tool, which hasn’t been built, but whose potential benefits are under careful consideration, aims to help with end-of-life decisions.

The challenge of end-of-life decision-making: When patients are unable to make their own medical decisions, the responsibility falls on surrogates, often family members, which can be emotionally distressing and lead to disagreements:

• In the case of Sophie, a woman in her mid-50s who suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, her family members couldn’t agree on whether to continue medical treatments or let her die peacefully.
• Surrogates often struggle with the burden of making life-or-death decisions on behalf of their loved ones, not knowing for certain what the patient would have wanted.

A proposed AI solution: Researchers are working on an AI-based tool that could help surrogates predict what patients would want in various end-of-life scenarios:

• The tool, proposed by David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues, would be trained on a person’s medical data, personal messages, and social media posts.
• The goal is to create a more accurate way of determining a patient’s wishes and to alleviate the emotional burden on surrogates who must make difficult decisions.

Ethical concerns and implementation challenges: While the AI tool has the potential to help in end-of-life decision-making, critics raise questions about the ethical implications of using personal data and relying on AI for such critical choices:

• There are concerns about how the tool can be ethically trained on a person’s data, as well as the privacy implications of using personal information for this purpose.
• Some question whether life-or-death decisions should ever be entrusted to AI, given the complexity and sensitivity of these situations.
• Implementing the tool will require securing funding and addressing the ethical and practical challenges associated with its development and deployment.

Broader implications: The proposed AI tool for end-of-life decision-making highlights the growing intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare, as well as the ethical dilemmas that arise when applying AI to sensitive, high-stakes situations. As researchers continue to explore the potential of AI in medicine, it is crucial to carefully consider the implications and ensure that the development and use of such tools prioritize patient autonomy, privacy, and well-being.