Awareness, Benefits, and Scepticism: Profiling Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence in the Healthcare Sector

Abstract

The introduction of Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare industry enhances the diagnostic accuracy, refines treatment protocols and improves overall efficiency in healthcare delivery. Understanding, acceptance and trust in the adoption of AI driven tools remains uneven. The present study focuses on three dimensions of public perception in the health care industry, namely, awareness, benefits and scepticism. For the present study, data has been collected from among 132 respondents through a structured questionnaire to assess their attitude towards AI driven healthcare. Quantitative analysis, including descriptive statistics, EFA, Pearsons’s correlation and cluster analysis was employed. The descriptive findings revealed moderately high levels of awareness (M = 3.59, SD = 0.80) and perceived benefits (M = 3.80, SD = 0.87), while respondents exhibited a relatively high level of scepticism (M = 4.01, SD = 0.64). A weak but statistically significant correlation was identified between awareness and benefits (r=0.18, p<0.05). Clustering revealed three distinct attitudinal groups. Findings of the study reveal that general awareness alone does not lead to acceptance, instead properly communicated, experience based benefits provide a stronger role in winning public trust (Topol, 2019; Mittelstadt, 2017). The implementation of AI in healthcare requires creating proper awareness, engage public values and thereby reducing scepticism.

Key Terms: Scepticism, Public perception, AI, Health care, Digital