Proponents of the use of AI in health care say the technology will modernize medicine, citing an impressive range of potential gains from improving diagnostics and risk prediction to more efficient billing and scheduling.
Sounds good, but will it? Two Holy Cross seniors say there’s reason for optimism — with a caveat or two.
Elena Filipowicz ’26 and Marisa Monahan ’26 studied the implications of AI in health care through a unique undergraduate research opportunity — the Weiss Summer Research Program, which provides undergraduates with funding to pursue in-depth research in a subject of their choosing or to assist a faculty member in their work.
Filipowicz and Monahan examined medical professionals’ opinions on the use of AI in healthcare across three dimensions: effectiveness, ethical implications and inherent bias. They spent eight weeks reviewing literature, surveying medical professionals, conducting a focus group and writing a paper, “The Ethics and Effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence in the Medical Field,” which they presented at the College’s annual Weiss Summer Research Symposium in fall 2025.
Monahan is a psychology major with minors in art history and neuroscience. She became interested in the applications of AI in medicine after her father had a stroke, often accompanying her father to his speech, occupational and physical therapy appointments. Filipowicz is also a psychology major with a minor in rhetoric and composition. While studying abroad at Trinity College Dublin as a junior, she took a course in neurological rehabilitation. Both students were encouraged by their professors to gain research experience while still undergraduates.
The pair created a 36-question survey and circulated it to 44 medical personnel, including physicians, nurses, and therapists. They worked with a project advisor, Carmen Alvaro Jarrín, associate professor and chair of the sociology and anthropology department at Holy Cross, whose expertise includes medical anthropology. The students credited Jarrín with encouraging them to take an interdisciplinary approach to their research, combining their knowledge of psychological statistical methods with anthropological and ethnological approaches to consider algorithmic bias; that is, how prejudices around race and gender can become embedded in an algorithm and lead to medical justice issues.
'People are cautiously optimistic'
The students say the health care professionals they surveyed anticipate AI being useful for some tasks, such as real-time language translation, note-taking and transcription.
“People are cautiously optimistic about the use of AI,” Monahan says. “There is a lot of hope for it to be effective in the medical field, but at the same time, it has to be carefully monitored because it does make mistakes and there is a chance of algorithmic bias.”
“A lot of these AI algorithms are only as good as the information fed into them,” Filipowicz adds.
Impressed by the pair’s work, Jarrín has encouraged Filipowicz and Monahan to submit their work to undergraduate research journals. Both students say that their Weiss research enhanced and extended their skills with analyzing qualitative and quantitative research, something Monahan will put to use directly as she pursues a master's of science in speech-language pathology at the Medical University of South Carolina starting in fall 2026. Filipowicz was deciding between jobs and volunteer opportunities at the time of this article’s publication.
One of the benefits of the Weiss program is that students wrestle with the same issues practitioners in the field face, Jarrín says. It is one thing to read theory about the potential ethical issues AI poses; it is another thing entirely to hear about how AI might affect patients’ health outcomes from practitioners. And the research indicates it is in the doctor-patient relationship where human beings excel, the students say. Their professor agrees.
“There’s something about human-to-human relationships that is never going to be replaced by AI,” Jarrín says. “We need doctors who care for their patients and talk to them.”
That’s been Monahan’s experience of her father’s recovery.
“Reading someone’s body language, their emotions — things so crucial to treatment — that can’t be replaced by a machine,” Monahan says.
