General Attitudes Towards and Readiness for Medical Artificial Intelligence among Medical and Health Sciences Students in Kazakhstan (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Medical AI is an exponentially expanding field with great potential to revolutionize healthcare. Many tasks in healthcare are now and in the future will integrate AI. It is essential for future medical and healthcare providers to be ready and to use them to optimize patient care. However, in Kazakhstan, the attitudes and readiness of medical and health sciences students toward medical AI still need to be discovered. OBJECTIVE This study assessed the general attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence (AI) and medical AI readiness among Kazakhstani medical and health sciences students and examined the factors influencing the students' medical AI readiness. METHODS A quantitative study using an online survey was conducted among medical and health sciences students at Nazarbayev University School of Medicine (NUSOM) in Spring 2023. We employed the “General Attitudes Towards Artificial Intelligence Scale” (GAAIS) to assess the students' AI attitudes and the “Medical Artificial Intelligence Readiness Scale for Medical Students” (MAIRS-MS) to measure the student's readiness for medical AI. RESULTS Nearly all of the students did not receive/ attended any education experience on AI from NUSOM (95.3%) or outside NUSOM (85.0%), and most of them received information about AI from the media (74.8%). The students reported poor knowledge of AI and its application in healthcare. The students demonstrated a negative to neutral general attitude toward AI and poor overall readiness for medical AI. Knowledge of AI applications in healthcare and a generally positive attitude toward AI was associated with increased readiness for medical AI among the students. CONCLUSIONS The study's findings can inform education policymakers and medical and health science professors in creating, introducing, and integrating new curricular content involving AI in medical schools. Including content on medical AI in medical and health sciences curricula will increase the students’ readiness and improve its use for more advanced patient care.