Patients increasingly expect more active involvement in their care and to play a role in health decisions with their care team. This has increased as patients have become more digitally savvy and have a wealth of health information and data at their fingertips—generative AI tools have further expanded this access to knowledge.
There’s an opportunity for health leaders to move away from a model with patients at the center of the care team, to them being a member of the care team with evidence at the center of shared decision-making. As patients become more informed and self-sufficient, it can also have wider impacts, like relieving staffing burdens. To be successful, patients and care teams alike need access to the same evidence and information—and AI has an opportunity to democratize this access.
AI has potential to support a new era of intelligent patient care
Patients tend to forget about 40-80% of what they hear in the clinic and 80% have follow-up questions, emphasizing the need for accessible, relevant patient education to keep them involved in their care. Volumes of data from EHRs and patient portals can help care become more personalized and tailored for patient needs. Applying AI to this information can help more easily surface relevant patient education content connected to care plans, diagnoses, and medications.
Dr. Holly Urban, Vice President, Business Development-Strategy for Wolters Kluwer Health sees high potential for clinical AI to help patients better understand their care journey, especially through patient education. It has to start with evidence-based information as a foundation, and not from misinformation or hallucinations from free AI tools. From there, AI can tailor and personalize information in their preferred mediums, languages, and comprehension level.
“We need to make sure that patients are accessing information that’s evidence-based and trusted,” she says. “And then, how do you want to understand or consume medical information? One thing AI does very, very well is personalization to your own style, to your own learning methods, to your own sort of comfort. I think there’s a huge potential for AI to help democratize medicine and help patients be more aware of what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and to better able to manage their own care.”
