The Promises, Pitfalls & Personalization of AI in Healthcare

Healthcare experiences are human experiences, and the use of advanced technology has often come at the expense of human connections – until now. The mass adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is underway, and – despite common skepticism around the technology’s use in healthcare – it promises an unprecedented level of transformation that will help us bring human understanding to the next level for patients.

Only about one in four individuals claim that they have a sense of how AI is used in healthcare, according to NRC Health’s latest national Market Insights study. There is promise in AI-driven care, from optimizing scheduling and streamlining operational processes to facilitating diagnoses, tailoring treatment plans and personalizing care. Our goal is to create a future where AI and humans work together seamlessly to deliver the best possible care.

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AI to Elevate Healthcare Experiences

Everyone seems to be asking “will AI take our jobs?”, so it is no wonder why even the mention of AI brings uncertainty. There is a risk with AI, but it is not here to replace human connection throughout the healthcare journey – it is here to enhance it.

When AI is integrated into organizational healthcare processes, such as scheduling, b****** and other administrative work, it can increase efficiency, reduce cost and improve patient experience. By automating mundane tasks and highlighting deeper insights, AI frees up healthcare professionals to focus on what matters most: connecting and building meaningful relationships with patients.

Beyond more time with patients, AI can provide real-time insights from patients and clinical teams that traditional surveys or feedback systems simply cannot. New, human-centric AI solutions may be built with a moral framework that ensures the technology closely aligns with societal values to deliver compassionate feedback, relevant coaching and the next best actions to frontline teams, leaders and clinicians.

There is a lot of “lost” unstructured data out there, especially in healthcare – with less than 1 percent of all information and interactions being captured for future use. However, next-gen AI tools can store the other 99 percent of information that often gets lost, allowing us to analyze and interact with it like never before.

Building Human-Centric AI Solutions

The fear of losing the sacred patient-provider relationship through technology is valid, but building personalized AI solutions allows patients to feel at ease and receive the tailored care they expect.

AI is only as good as the data that we put into it. New AI solutions can capture the unstructured data that often gets lost – such as comments, free text and video or audio clips at scale – and make narrative summaries or time-saving Q&As to deliver real-time empathetic feedback and valuable insights to healthcare professionals. This feature adds depth to human connections, without taking any time away from them.

Healthcare-focused AI tools should also acknowledge and address bias, inequity and misleading information, both in the way it is designed and how it is used. Data curation, factual guardrails and governance standards must be embedded into AI engines during model builds and then checked as large language model (LLM) responses are generated. This will help ensure accuracy and further garner trust from patients and care teams.

AI that is focused on how humans communicate increases the volume of insights and complements providers, rather than replacing them. However, it takes people to use AI responsibly and empathetically to achieve positive healthcare experiences and outcomes.

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Potential Pitfalls of AI in Healthcare

There remains confusion among patients, consumers and healthcare professionals about what AI is, the benefits and risks it carries and ethical concerns it will continue to raise as usage grows. Healthy skepticism around AI is certainly warranted, as we need to be most cautious when integrating technology into the healthcare experience. There are three primary concerns to be aware of:

1. Transparency: AI systems work by crunching vast amounts of data – often including medical records, protected health information, diagnostic images and more. This can present challenges for ensuring the deidentification and long-term secure storage of sensitive health information. As AI becomes more prevalent, building trust by explicitly communicating a commitment to ethical AI practices will become increasingly important.
2. Bias: Another area of caution for the ethical use of AI is conscious and unconscious bias in data, algorithms, outputs and interpretations. To further garner trust and avoid bias, it is helpful to have the AI engine’s UX share source materials and requests for users to validate information.
3. Chatbot Hallucinations: Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are trained to predict strings of words based on massive datasets. They can lack reasoning and are not sensitive to factual inconsistencies or misleading statements. Outputs often emerge from the AI model’s inherent biases and lack of real-world understanding, which is particularly concerning for healthcare use cases.

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The Future of Empathetic AI

While not without its risks, AI that is focused on human-centric data offers insights that allow health systems to illuminate and improve what matters most to patients, frontline teams and communities – ultimately elevating and improving human connection across the healthcare landscape.

The future of AI in healthcare is poised for continued growth and innovation, and you may be wondering “what’s next?” – health systems will soon have the opportunity to leverage a suite of personalized AI assistants to help clinicians, executives and staff make better, informed decisions much faster. Whether you are a physician trying to improve a patient’s experience or an executive trying to frame the organization’s strategy for the next three years, these personalized assistants will be tailored to help different personas manage their journeys more efficiently.

AI removes bottlenecks and frees up time, which is of the essence in healthcare, but it also does much more. It equips health systems with the tools needed to see the entirety of the patient journey. This exciting new era of patient care offers next-gen solutions to achieve better outcomes for patients, care teams, health systems, communities and bottom lines – and this is just the beginning.

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