Teaching doctors good bedside manners may not be the first thing that comes to mind when considering AI in healthcare, but one doctor in England has set out to prove that machines can in fact teach people how to get along.
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, Alex Young, a Bristol, England-based orthopedic surgeon, set out in 2018 to apply AI to the task of improving physicians’ people skills as a way of helping them manage difficult moments like breaking bad news to patients or explaining particularly tricky diagnoses.
“What we wanted to do with the virtual patient was create a scalable, data-driven way for people to practice their soft skills and communication,” Young explained, and three years post-launch his start-up, Virti, is offering “virtual patients” to providers across Europe and the U.S. to teach doctors better communications skills.
“What we wanted to do with the virtual patient was create a scalable, data-driven way for people to practice their soft skills and communication,” Young said.
According to the article, the software can be used on multiple platforms, and “once the training session is over, doctors are scored based on their speed, the questions they asked the AI and whether they got the fake patient’s diagnosis correct.”
The company raised $2 million in seed funds in 2019, which enabled it to launch a sales team and enhance its analytics software, and it’s been picked up by providers as far flung from the UK as the Health Education Center at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
In the UK, meanwhile, the program, which uses speech recognition, AI and computer-generated characters to simulate realistic interactions with patients, has been picked up by the NHS “to teach staff how to properly use personal protective equipment and how to engage with patients and their families.”
Explains the article, “Hospitals can customize how Virti's avatars look before doctor's train with them. Doctors can probe with further questions, and as they interact, the software analyzes their tone, cadence and quality of answers. VR headsets unlock other metrics, such as eye contact tracking.”
The software was also designed to train against implicit bias, which can taint diagnoses.