Steven Novella writes in his blog at Science and Medicine “Optimal medical practice would maximize several outcomes simultaneously — the patient experience, doctor and patient autonomy, medical outcomes, and cost effectiveness, to name the most important. The problem is, you can’t always get all of these things to an optimal degree at the same time. Medical outcomes, for example, are optimized when quality control measures are put into place, but these measures often reduce patient and doctor autonomy. Cost constraints also may come at the expense of patient experience and doctor-patient autonomy (we hope not medical outcome, but realistically, this also).” (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/patient-participation-in-decision-making/). He continues “I find it interesting that over the same course of time, the last few decades, there has been a shift away from physician experience as the ultimate arbiter of decision-making, to evidence-based medicine, practice standards, and quality control. The evidence is pretty clear that evidence-based guidelines produce better outcomes than physicians relying on their own experience and judgment.”
When evidence available giving autonomy to patients and physicians in decision making may not be beneficial for patients and the healthcare system. Instead of involving patients into decision making, we should focus our efforts to making medicine more evidence-based. In this case, expert systems and AI provides more value than human providers.