By Dr. Amy Bucher, Chief Behavioral Officer, Lirio
LinkedIn: Amy Bucher
LinkedIn: Lirio
Depending on who you ask, artificial intelligence is either the savior of healthcare or its assassin. Both perspectives are exaggerated. In reality, AI is a set of tools that, like any other, require careful implementation and oversight to successfully support the objectives of patients, providers, systems and other entities in the healthcare ecosystem. Moreover, AI is a broad and deep category of applications suited to multiple purposes.
Generative AI that creates new content using large language models, recommendation systems that offer suggestions for actions based on predictive algorithms, and reinforcement learning which trains on defined behavioral objectives to personalize nudges are all examples of AI. These diverse applications of AI highlight its potential to enhance various aspects of the healthcare system when used thoughtfully and responsibly.
However, the promise of AI in healthcare goes beyond these technical capabilities. By integrating AI with behavioral science, healthcare providers can achieve a deeper understanding of patient behaviors and motivations. This integration allows for more effective and personalized interventions, leading to better patient engagement and outcomes. AI can also streamline administrative processes, freeing healthcare professionals to focus on direct patient care. The key to successful AI implementation lies in its ability to complement and enhance the human touch, ensuring that technology serves as an enabler rather than a replacement.
Here’s 5 ways AI can make the complex healthcare experience easier:
- AI can identify which patients are eligible for a procedure, service or communication. Eligibility criteria can quickly become onerous, and, often the data that suggests a course of action might be right for a patient is messy or stored across multiple databases. AI can parse complex data much more efficiently than a human and compare it against expert-generated recommendations to determine who is a candidate for what types of offerings.
- AI can personalize calls to action to engage and activate patients. Behavioral science consistently shows personalization is a key ingredient in effective interventions. People want to be treated as individuals. AI can efficiently personalize calls to action along multiple dimensions, including content, modality and timing.
- AI can knit together the digital tools that comprise a patient’s care routine. A persistent issue in digital health is that people stop using tools; one reason is that it’s difficult for them to see the effect of using those tools on their overall progress, due in part to siloed data. AI has the potential to help patients – and their providers – integrate how their use of digital health influences their overall health.
- When expert oversight is needed, AI can quickly sound the alarm. When patients struggle or experience a change that requires their provider to get involved, AI can recognize leading indicators in their data and alert the necessary professionals on their care team.
- AI lets providers practice medicine. In many health systems across the nation, trained medical professionals spend hours each day attending to administrative duties, including appointment reminders. For most, this means time spent away from providing patient care and using their core expertise. By offloading certain administrative tasks to appropriate AI systems, doctors, nurses and other care professionals can spend more time doing what they are trained to do: practice medicine.
Asking whether AI will replace humans in healthcare is the wrong question. Rather, the question is how AI can be used to amplify the human touch in healthcare to maximize patient health and well-being, and help providers fulfill their mission as healers.