Our healthcare system was designed for an earlier era, when acute and infectious diseases were the nation’s biggest healthcare problem. But that’s no longer the case. The main challenge now is chronic disease.
So argues Julia Hu, CEO of Lark, a AI-powered chronic disease prevention and management platform, in a recent commentary at Medical Economics.
The statistics she cites are pretty stark. “By 2020, about 157 million Americans — nearly half of the U.S. population — will be managing a chronic disease, with 81 million people managing more than one.”
Needless to say, managing these conditions for so many people is an expensive proposition, but the problem is compounded by the fact that the nation is facing a looming provider shortage.
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Projections, there is a need for an additional 203,700 new RNs each year through 2026 to fill newly created positions and to replace retiring nurses,” Hu says, adding, “To make matters worse, by 2032, the United States could see a shortage between 46,900 and 121,900 physicians.”
Given the apparent facts on the ground, so to speak, along with the fact that the future, as the population ages, largely promises more of the same, what can be done to adapt the healthcare system and what’s the role that AI can play?
As Hu sees it, “First, we need to make staying healthy or managing a chronic condition less difficult and less burdensome. People who have a chronic disease or are at-risk of developing one need highly personalized care that gives them ongoing support when they need it. In truth, that kind of care is not always very complex, but it is very time consuming and life long.”
Second, she says, “we need a healthcare system that can deliver care to half of the nation’s population every day.”
On both fronts, she argues, we need what she dubs “conversational AI.” To be sure, while AI has not been developed to the point where it can replace highly trained humans, it already “works very well in tightly constrained, large scale, and data-rich situations. While it cannot replace doctors, nurses, and health coaches, it can provide the type of care needed to help people manage chronic conditions every day. The interventions are largely similar across many of the most prevalent chronic conditions — the modality should be ongoing small touch points of support that feels empathetic, compassionate, and friendly. In addition, AI can base these touch points on daily health data.”
In short, then, let AI handle the daily routine of attentively monitoring the needs of chronic care patients, thus freeing up the resources and personnel necessary to address acute care situations for which AI will likely never be an option.
After all, she says, “it does not take a health professional with 15 years of training to provide the day-by-day, hour-by-hour support needed to help people stay healthy. Instead, we should be thinking about care that can meet people where they are — right on their smartphones that they carry with them all the time.”
Granted, she notes, this may not be the most exciting or provocative use of AI in healthcare, “but it’s the one that will make the healthcare system more efficient and effective, and, ultimately, will result in better health outcomes while potentially saving billions of dollars.”