Bot MD CEO Dorothea Koh on Using AI in Medicine

Bot MD CEO Dorothea Koh discusses using AI in medicine at the TIME100 Leadership Forum in Singapore.

Transcript

00:00 you trust an AI to diagnose you.

00:03 Today, we trust AIs to fly planes.

00:06 When you get on an airplane, typically the AI is flying it.

00:08 The computer is flying it.

00:10 To me, I think the role of AI in medicine

00:12 is really about augmenting what doctors do.

00:15 I don't believe that an AI can actually

00:17 replace a doctor, because there's a human element.

00:20 When you go into a clinic, most doctors

00:22 will tell you there's patients that lie all the time.

00:26 When you go into a clinic and you see your doctor,

00:29 and your doctor goes, have you been drinking?

00:31 You're going to say no.

00:33 Now, an AI is not going to know that you're lying,

00:37 because the AI only knows what you tell it.

00:39 But a doctor reads body language.

00:42 He looks at your family.

00:44 He sees the body language of everybody around you.

00:46 And for me, that's really where AI plays a role.

00:49 It's not to replace the doctor, but it's

00:52 to take all the things that a doctor does,

00:54 which they really don't have to do,

00:56 and figure out how to automate that.

00:58 So one of the ways that we do this

01:00 is we use AI to actually power chat apps.

01:02 And the reason why we power chat apps,

01:03 because everybody has WhatsApp, Facebook, Line, Telegram.

01:07 We don't need you to download another app.

01:10 But we can actually use AI to power chat apps and scale

01:14 that all around the world.

01:16 We talk about access.

01:17 Everybody has phones.

01:18 And if you look at every single country in this region,

01:22 one of the things that keeps growing year after year

01:26 is internet.

01:27 Right?

01:27 I go to the Philippines.

01:28 There's like 80 million people in the Philippines

01:30 with Facebook.

01:32 Indonesia, 190 million people out of 280 have WhatsApp.

01:37 So for me, that's really how we can marry tech and health

01:41 to really reach more people.

01:44 more people.