Medical AI is booming without accounting for the human factor, says a TNW columnist

The Next Web columnist Freddie del Barrio published a piece in 2026 that asks an uncomfortable question: does the rapid expansion of AI in medicine actually benefit patients, or is the industry simply automating while losing the very thing medicine exists for?

Why medical AI is gaining momentum

The logic behind the interest in healthcare AI is clear. Systems around the world face several pressures at once:

• An aging population: demand for medical services is growing faster than new specialists are appearing
• Staff burnout: doctors and caregivers are working at the limit of their capacity
• Budget pressure: administrators are forced to do more with less

AI solutions offer a way out: automate routine work, speed up paperwork, reduce the load on staff. Every week the industry announces another smart chatbot for initial triage, a new AI assistant for doctors, an automated workflow for clinics or a "digital caregiver" for elderly patients at home.

What automation leaves out

This, in del Barrio's view, is where the fault line runs. Medicine is not only diagnosis and routing. It is presence, contact, the ability to sense a patient's anxiety before they put it into words. These qualities cannot be digitized.

The problem is not that AI does poorly at the tasks it was built for. The problem is the order of priorities: the success metrics for AI solutions are speed, reach and lower cost per transaction. The human dimension is not part of those metrics.

A chatbot that handles an initial inquiry quickly and correctly does not register that the patient's voice is trembling. An algorithm recommending treatment does not notice that behind a question about a symptom lies the fear of hearing a diagnosis. A digital check-up reminder does not replace a call from a nurse who remembers the name of the patient's child.

"Health systems are under enormous pressure, staff are overstretched, and the aging population is growing faster than the workforce that supports it," writes del

Barrio, describing the context in which AI looks indispensable.

Tools that are supposed to free the doctor for real conversation with the patient increasingly become one more layer of digital mediation between them.

What this means

Del Barrio's column does not call for slowing the adoption of AI in medicine, which would be unrealistic given the industry's real crisis. His point is different: the design of medical AI systems should ask "does this tool strengthen human presence in care?" before moving on to questions of efficiency. Otherwise the industry risks building a highly efficient system that is bad at being humane.