PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Health Serv.
Sec. Health Policy and Management
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frhs.2025.1694139
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Rethinking Doctor-Patient Relationship in Megacities
Provisionally accepted
- College of Applied Arts and Sciences, Beijing Union University, Beijing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Artificial intelligence has been extensively applied in healthcare, offering significant potential to improve the quality of medical services. However, it also introduces critical challenges, such as privacy infringement, algorithmic discrimination, and ambiguous liability. Focusing on megacities, with Beijing as a primary case, this study examines how artificial intelligence can effectively address systemic challenges within megacity healthcare systems while leveraging technological and institutional advantages to maximize its benefits. The integration of artificial intelligence inevitably influences the doctor–patient relationship, reducing information asymmetry, enhancing patient autonomy, and transforming the traditional doctor–patient dualistic interaction structure into a doctor–artificial intelligence–patient triad interaction structure. These effects are pronounced in megacities, presenting new challenges including crisis of trust, intensified disputes, and emotional and communication distance. Given that the integration of artificial intelligence into healthcare is inevitable, especially for megacities like Beijing, proactive governance is essential. This includes institutionalizing the triad interaction model, deepening the integration of artificial intelligence in healthcare by leveraging the advantages of megacities, and establishing regulatory frameworks to mitigate risks while harnessing potential.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, healthcare, Doctor-patient relationship, Megacity, Beijing
Received: 28 Aug 2025; Accepted: 08 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 CHEN. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Qi CHEN, College of Applied Arts and Sciences, Beijing Union University, Beijing, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.