Empower clinicians and patients with AI in primary care

Opportunities for AI in primary care

At UpToDate^®, we’ve been excited about the opportunities to expand how expert clinical decision support content can enhance clinician workflows and be embedded within health system operations. We recently announced a partnership with Lumeris and their flagship agentic AI solution, TOM^™, which can act as an extended member of the care team to help scale clinician efforts.

At a Becker’s Healthcare conference, David Carmouche, Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at Lumeris, and I spoke on the opportunities for AI to help support primary care delivery. In my view, AI is a tremendous opportunity to match the context of the patient with the evidence-based resources that clinicians might need. It can’t fix everything, but it can provide some benefits in efficiencies and operations, and can help lift the health system overall.

Delivering real-time evidence in the workflow at scale

Our mission at UpToDate is to provide expertly curated, evidence-based information and recommendations to clinicians so they can make more informed decisions and determine care plans. We’ve been trusted for over three decades for our clinician-created content, and now the technology is at a level where we can scale and operationalize into workflows in ways we couldn’t before. The prevalence of EHRs provides an opportunity to get the content even further within the workflow and closer to the point of care.

EHRs also provide a wealth of data for AI to review and optimize for clinicians to better serve their patients. In the case of Lumeris, TOM^™ could potentially review longitudinal data from EHRs, claims data, and pharmacy and lab data to understand the patient better and surface the most relevant UpToDate clinical content and care recommendations with context for that specific patient. This can all happen in real-time while the patient is present, so as new information is coming in from lab results, revised medication prescriptions, or updated family health histories, the most relevant evidence-based recommendations can be displayed based on the new data.

Enabling patients outside of the care setting

Just as AI could provide that contextual information within a care visit, it could also provide it ahead of visits. As patients further engage with online portals, it can prepare summaries and resources for clinician interactions prior to their encounter, helping to further guide conversations and reduce the chance of patients forgetting questions. AI chatbots or outreach calls can ask questions during scheduling or pre-screening to help identify appropriate evidence and patient education for clinician review. They can also help provide triage or support care plan engagement and adherence to help enable patients to be partners in their care without requiring an in-person visit, freeing up resources for more complex or necessary appointments.

Surfacing patient information and education for context

Another opportunity for AI is to provide more personalized, contextual educational content for patients. Currently, at UpToDate, we write patient education content at a couple of different reading levels, and it’s aligned with our trusted clinician resource. Generally, we write our content at a third to sixth grade level to be the most accessible for patients. However, more complex diagnoses and conditions require a deeper level of knowledge and understanding. When a patient has a serious, complex condition, they are naturally going to search for as much detailed information as they can find, so we write content for those patients at a high school or college level. We also provide a lot of patient content in a wide variety of languages.

The AI opportunity here is to understand the patient's needs from all of this context—their age, education level, diagnosis, and native language—and to quickly surface the most appropriate resources for the clinicians to review and provide from within the workflow. They don’t have to dig or spend extra effort trying to decide which resource makes sense, and can avoid not realizing a more in-depth resource is available. The AI assistant can act as that peer consult and suggest relevant education for the context. Our patient education is already available for Epic customers, so layering AI features can enhance that workflow for care teams.

As AI and technology rapidly advance, we’re excited for more opportunities to enhance clinical workflows through our rapidly expanding partnerships. But regardless of where technology goes, our commitment to responsible, evidence-based information for clinicians remains the same. Explore more about our partnership with Lumeris and our perspective on AI in clinical decision support. To consider how you could systematically impact your primary care efforts through a broader, systems thinking approach, download our UpToDate Point of Care Report on supporting team-based care with clinical evidence.