We pointed recently to the lingering uncertainty among many healthcare executives concerning how best to put AI to use in their organizations, and as if on cue a team of stakeholders at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the American Medical Association have produced a list of 10 primary care areas where AI is beginning to pay off.
As reviewed over at HealthLeadersMedia, the article points out it’s no surprise primary care is leading the charge as PCP’s get over 500 million visits annually.
Among the specific areas AI is beginning to impact are diagnostics and clinical decision-making. In the former category, “AI algorithms have made inroads for diagnosing several diseases, including skin cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, brain cancer, and cardiac arrhythmias. When deployed in areas of the country that have shortages of medical specialists, these diagnostic technologies have the potential to expand the services provided by primary care physicians.”
As for helping docs with decisions, the authors point to several EHR companies that “are adding AI to workflows to provide clinicians with digital clinical decision support tools. For example, Nashville-based HCA Healthcare has deployed an EHR-based clinical decision support tool called Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy (SPOT) that can detect sepsis about 18 hours earlier than the best clinicians.”
On a broader level, population health management and risk prevention are also seeing the effects of new AI. For example, the authors note, “AI has the potential to identify and close care gaps as well as to improve healthcare providers' performance in quality payment programs such as those established under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015,” while one Phoenix-based provider is using new AI technology “to predict risk for 42 health conditions to reduce emergency room and hospital utilization through primary care interventions.”
Another, perhaps more easily imagined, use comes in the digital arena. For example, the article points out that “(n)early a quarter of Americans have wearable devices that collect health data such as vital signs, but this voluminous data is often unwieldy and incompatible with healthcare provider EHRs.” New AI may provide just the ticket when it comes to taming “this cumbersome treasure trove of wearable-device data.”
Other areas the article points to include risk adjustment, digital coaching and practice management.
Despite the myriad technological advances, the writers argue that the key to making all this high-tech wizardry truly productive “is to never lose sight of the patient-provider relationship as the single most important ingredient that makes everything else in healthcare possible. Patients need to trust that AI is not replacing part of their care, and that they are still being cared for by human providers who know them and care deeply about them.”