The role of AI and personalized medicine in healthcare: balancing technological advancements and the art of medicine

In recent decades, global political efforts have increasingly focused on the transformative potential of personalized medicine to prevent disease, improve health outcomes, and lower treatment costs. This has created at pressing demand for healthcare professionals to deepen their understanding and utilizing health data and its application in clinical decision-making. In response, a new master's program in personalized medicine has been launched across five universities in Denmark. This study, drawing on the sociology of expertise, investigates how educators and master's students in the program perceive and engage with the knowledge necessary for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into patient treatment and care. Our findings suggest a prevailing belief among educators in the potential of AI and big data to revolutionize healthcare by personalizing treatment options and improving diagnostic processes. Course participants generally acknowledged the ethical responsibility to leverage the vast amounts of data provided by patients to enhance treatment outcomes. However, some feared it might undermine the clinical insight they had gained through years of experience - insights they described as 'the art of medicine.' They navigated their agency and autonomy in the human-algorithm collaboration by framing algorithms as supportive additions to human judgment rather than replacements for it. In conclusion, this paper advocates for a more integrated approach that combines big data analysis with practical experience in healthcare.