We’re entering a new era in healthcare where prevention strategies can be ramped up by maximizing the power of AI and greater patient engagement. Preventive care has always been a priority for clinicians—it supports value-based care initiatives, improves health outcomes, and lowers costs.
At Wolters Kluwer Health, we’re seeing significant engagement in this area. Within the UpToDate® clinical decision support platform, clinicians searched six core prevention categories over 25.6 million times during a three-year period. The opportunity to leverage this information with new AI technologies, EHR data, and engaging patient education to encourage overall wellness can help bring better outcomes for healthcare organizations.
Shifting from reactive to proactive treatment
Historically, to find patients in need of preventive services, we’d have to do exhaustive reviews of paper charts. EHRs pushed us forward, allowing us to run reports and identify groups of patients in need of services. Organizations are still working to make the most of those reports, and many clinicians feel like we’re still being somewhat reactive since our primary focus is usually the patient in front of us actively seeking care.
Now, AI is able to proactively tie data together in novel ways and at scale. It can perform a search, identify the patients, and suggest the best way to communicate with individuals based on their preferences and past response rates. Certain patients may want to respond to a letter or a text message, or maybe an email with a text follow-up. Others may prefer patient portal messages. Individual clinicians can’t keep track of every preference, but AI can leverage clinical notes to help tailor and personalize the outreach to that patient for more effective preventive care follow-through.
AI can also sift through vast amounts of EHR data collected over the past decades and over millions of patient encounters, and analyze it to identify population health opportunities. For example, we’re seeing an uptick in pickleball injuries, especially in the over-60 crowd. It’s become a popular way for people to stay fit, and is also connected to injuries like falls, sprains, and fractures. AI can help clinicians make those connections as they write patient notes, and then, perhaps, it can surface helpful patient education on potential injury mitigation.
