The practice of medicine involves complex -- often stressful -- communication between healthcare providers and patients and their families. People with chronic conditions are often advised to follow detailed treatment plans; end-of-life care often requires many complex (and emotionally draining) decisions; options for treating certain diseases are increasing dramatically. How much could health outcomes be improved with more effective communication between patients and healthcare providers? In a recent article in theBMJ, researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Edinburgh explore the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve patient/provider communication.
"Many clinicians' communications skills aren't formerly assessed -- either during school or in early practice. At the same time, there is a lot of evidence that clinicians often struggle when communicating with their patients. It's hard to improve on something when you're not being given any feedback and don't know how you're doing," says senior author and Dartmouth Institute Professor Glyn Elwyn, MD, PhD, MSc.
Elwyn and his co-authors say that AI has the potential to revolutionize communication in medicine by providing clinicians with personalized, highly detailed assessments of their communication skills at lower costs than the manual methods being sporadically employed at present. They point to three key areas of analysis in which AI, used in conjunction with the digital recordings of medical visits, has the potential to significantly improve medical communications:
While the researchers predict rapid advancements in the use of AI in medical communication, particularly in analysis of turn taking and provider intonation, they also note that healthcare poses particular challenges in applying speech recognition. The dialogue of medical encounters is complex. While a skilled provider will adjust their communication style to meet the needs of their patients, even the most advanced AI systems are incapable of parsing and assessing the complexities of these interactions -- at least for now.
“五年前,使用人工智能分析的想法edical communication wouldn't have been on anyone's radar," Elwyn says. "As the technology advances, it will be interesting to see whether healthcare systems can employ it effectively and whether providers will be open to using it as a tool for improving their communication skills."
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