Maintain Human-Centered Focus

AI technologies should augment not replace human judgment and interaction. By adopting a human-centered approach, medical educators, staff, and learners bring critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability to cocreate and integrate AI with educational activities. Human relationships must remain a core value and decision driver in this process. This includes relationships with patients and between educators and learners. AI should assist educators, staff, and learners in making more informed decisions without supplanting their roles or disrupting these relationships. 

The transformative power of AI requires that medical educators be able to critically evaluate AI outputs and understand their limitations. Developing foundational AI literacy is critical but not sufficient. Considering all aspects of medical education through an AI lens is an important step. Medical educators, staff, and learners also need to be diligent and proactive in preparing for future innovations and potential impacts of AI on learning and health care.

From Principle to Practice

Apply this principle to your practice using the following strategies: 

• Promote humanism in medicine. Strengthen a human-centered approach in medical education by fostering interdisciplinary teams focused on humanism that engage with and consider the impact of AI technologies. Existing humanism and medicine initiatives can serve as incubators for this work.
• Review and revise existing curricula through an AI lens. Consider how AI may enhance and/or threaten learning outcomes, content, educational activities, and assessments across existing educational programs. Including key stakeholders such as learners, patients, and AI experts will ensure a human- and relationship-centered approach. 
• Leverage human-centered design models. Emphasis needs to be placed on involving humans throughout the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of education for conceptual understanding about AI, using AI for teaching and learning, and/or integrating AI to transform education. A human in the loop builds trust and transparency to realize the significant benefits of AI. Applying human-centered approaches, such as design thinking, to solve problems and/or innovate regarding AI in medical education emphasizes the focus on the needs and experiences of educators while engaging in rapid iterative cycles.
• Focus on competency and skill development. Becoming confident and competent using AI tools requires education to focus skills, attitudes, and behaviors necessary1 to use, evaluate, and apply AI2 ; to harness the power of AI requires people. Competency centering on enhancing durable, human-centric skills,3  such as critical thinking, problem-solving, empathy, skepticism, and advocacy, focuses on outcomes associated with preparing a future-ready, adaptive workforce. The Master Adaptive Learner model promotes learner agency and experiential learning to develop competency and the ability to “learn, adapt, and thrive” in this dynamic environment.4
• Remember the learning environment. Although contextual, the psychosocial (personal, social, and organizational) and material (virtual and physical) dimensions of the learning environment inform education interventions and innovations.5  These dimensions are especially important when integrating AI into medical education to assess how we are promoting human connection, human agency, and values associated with significant learning experiences.6  Learning environments that prioritize relationships support humans learning together and adapt to changing circumstances while also supporting humans cooperating, collaborating, and cocreating with AI.