BOSTON – The ability to transform the way healthcare providers communicate with patients using artificial intelligence involves not only accuracy, transparency, fairness and maintaining data models, but also finding ways to meet the challenges of personalization.
What patients want to know and when will add another layer of complexity — a challenge for healthcare AI that must consider both the intended and unintended perspectives of patients, according to speakers at the HIMSS Healthcare AI Forum on Thursday.
With the ability to contextualize and allow clinicians to interact with patients in a more humane way without data entry, artificial intelligence can transform the patient-clinician interaction.
“To some extent, these impressive tools are evolving much faster than health systems can even consider how they are embedded, really positioned, or provide a huge opportunity to personalize that conversation, what’s important to that person, and advise and support them in making decisions that are relevant to them,” said Anne Snowdon, director of research at HIMSS, the parent company of the Health and Wellness Center. Healthcare IT News.
While the utility of AI technology is an important part of the trust discussion, mapping transparency, choice, autonomy, and decision-making is critically important for patients.
“In that sense, it’s starting to redefine and rethink care,” said Snowdon, who moderated the conference. Snowdon has a doctorate in nursing.
Improve communication with patients
Snowdon joins Alexandra Wright, patient advocate and director of research at HIMSS, Dr. Chethan Sarabu, director of clinical innovation at Cornell Tech’s Health Tech Hub, Mark Polyak, president of analytics at IPSOS, and Dr. Lukasz Kowalczyk, physician at Peak Gastroenterology Associates, to discuss in depth what patients want from an AI-powered healthcare experience.
“While the healthcare industry is still figuring out how to address the challenges posed by the illusion of artificial intelligence, AI can elevate conversations and build more trust,” said Sarabu, who is also a board member of the Light Collective, a nonprofit that seeks to promote the rights, interests, and collective voice of the patient community in the health tech space.
During his work with the team, Sarabu said he heard during a patient insights workshop that a patient who thought she was communicating with a very helpful nurse named Jessica at her clinic through the patient portal expressed distrust when she asked to see that nurse in person at her doctor’s office.
“She just said she wished they had told her it was a chatbot before,” he said.
“You don’t want to scam your patients,” jokes Kowalczyk, a practicing gastroenterologist and adviser at Denver-based Cliexa, a digital health platform.
But if patients know that healthcare chatbots like Jessica aren’t real people, their plight could be improved by AI’s compassionate communication.
“Compassion fatigue is a real thing in health care,” Kowalczyk says. “It can be hard sometimes, especially when you’re going through a day, and just one or two patients really make it hard to get going the next day.”
Large language models are very effective at converting and translating information and describing patient concerns to clinicians, giving them “time to breathe” and regain empathy, he said.
“I think those are opportunities where patients feel like AI is acting as their advocate and helping me get to know them better as a person.”
The Dynamics of Personalization
AI may not add to the patient’s vision of care. In certain situations – such as predictive analytics – AI may provide information that the patient does not want.
“Maybe some patients want more information, some want less, or some want less information in an in-person visit, but they want to review more material afterward,” says Sarabu.
From a physician’s perspective, “It’s difficult to personalize all the information, context, and content for each patient.”
According to Polyak, there are three elements of care – access to care, access to accurate information, and speed of information transmission.
Of the patients who use ChatGPT, 16% ask health care questions to reduce health care costs, he noted.
“[They] asked ChatGPT to provide them with different scenarios of how our physicians should approach their care based on what they have — to reduce costs.”
“It wasn’t something I really expected, but they basically just created a script that they would print out and bring with them” to appointments.
The sense of control also varies from patient to patient.
For patients and their families facing a health crisis, “information really is power,” Wright said.
“Usually when you get into these situations, you feel out of control,” she said.
“And if you don’t understand your condition or don’t understand what’s going on, you can really feel like you don’t have control over what’s happening to you.”
When doctors are no longer in the room and patients have questions, they turn to search engines and ChatGPT for information, she said.
Context also plays an important role in determining what information the patient wants to control.
“When I first got to the hospital, would I have wanted them to tell me my survival odds? Probably not, because I don’t think that would have helped the situation,” Wright said.
“But looking back now, if someone told me about my future risk of cancer, would I want to know if there was anything I could do to prevent it? Probably yes.”
What the detailed discussion suggests, Snowdon said, is turning the use of AI in healthcare upside down: “How do we help people make those decisions for themselves, informed with a sense of confidence and [discover] What is most meaningful to them?
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
