The Role of AI in Building a Culture of Partnership between Patients and Providers.
Steven Dolins, R. Kero · National Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2006
The medical community needs IT applications that support safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable healthcare. Improving communication between patients and providers is one area where IT can help. A new patient-centered care process environment should be built; in this data analysis environment patients can ask appropriate medical questions and obtain clear explanations. AI technology can help tailor the environment for a specific patient’s needs. Introduction Despite technological advances over the past thirty years, and significant investments made in information technology (IT) by the medical community, computer technology has still yet to produce the innovation needed to mature the organization and delivery of care. (Kaushal 2005, pg. 106) A complicated mix of political, economic, sociological, and technical reasons are largely responsible for the shortcomings of health care IT systems. Although an adequate discussion of these issues is far beyond the scope of this paper, one persistent reason for these failings is that IT investment has been focused on addressing the economically lucrative business side of health care delivery, instead of dealing with the significantly more complex orchestration of patient care. (Kaushal 2005) In spite of the fact that the past performance of IT has been checkered, the medical community still looks toward advances in IT to help solve many health care problems. The Committee on the Quality of Health Care in America was formed by the Institute of Medicine in 1998 to develop a strategy to improve the quality of health care over a ten year period. Subsequently, the committee authored