An AI Future that Benefits Patients and Doctors

Imagine a world where physicians can spend a meaningful amount of time with patients. What impact would that have on the healthcare landscape? How would medicine be impacted if physicians didn’t feel as stressed? How would patients fare if the cost of healthcare wasn’t so high? The American Medical Association (AMA) has been thinking about these very aspects of practice and how the integration of artificial intelligence into the practice of medicine can help move toward such a future.

Figure 1: 2017 Health Spend per Capita. Source: Health System Tracker

Figure 2: EHR Adoption Rates in the United States. From the Office of the National Coordinator Health IT.

In the United States, the average spend per capita on healthcare is around $10,000 per year (Figure 1). On top of that it value being double the spend of many wealthy nations, it’s believed that approximately 25–30% of that is wasted on various systemic inefficiencies. Luckily increasing efficiency is one of the major strengths of data science. One question we might need to first answer is from where do we get the data?

Since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the adoption of electronic health record systems (EHRs) dramatically increased (Figure 2). ARRA included funding that would help with the switch to EHRs. It also tied Medicare reimbursements to “meaningful use” of EHRs by January 2014.

While there are concerns about the use of EHRs, there are multiple benefits. EHRs provide unprecedented access to patient information — which allows for coordination of care, increased efficacy in diagnosis and safer care. Additionally, EHRs provide a wealth of information that can be utilized to improve the standard of care, improve the quality of care, or even find disease outbreaks earlier.

Figure 3: Main sources of physician burnout. Source: Medscape

Another concern of the AMA is the wellbeing of physicians. Physicians face burnout at a rate nearly twice that of the general public. Figure 3 highlights the main sources of burnout, as per the Medscape National Physician Burnout, Depression & Suicide Report (2019). At the top of the list we have: too many bureaucratic tasks; too many hours at work; and EHRs.

The AMA sees the term Augmented Intelligence as the way forward. This conceptualization of artificial intelligence focuses on using artificial intelligence in an assistive role, in order to emphasize that its design enhances human intelligence rather than replacing it. Augmented intelligence would feature machine learning models that can reduce the workload of clinicians — either by helping in diagnosis or reducing time spent doing administrative work. The conference featured two products that aim specifically to reduce the time spent charting — Suki and Saykara.

The AMA has an entire section of their site dedicated to the role of artificial intelligence in the healthcare system.