Researchers and companies have been working on using Artificial Intelligence to solve healthcare problems for some time. AI models have been trained on medical journals to help doctors make diagnostic decisions based on symptoms and scans. ChatGPT has been trained on enough medical information that it can pass a medical licensing exam. However, the embrace of healthcare AI needs to be tempered by awareness of the AI’s limitations. While chatGPT can use the large corpus of text that it was trained on to find an appropriate response, it cannot think for itself and often provides wrong or nonsensical answers. If you ask Chat GPT to provide medical advice, it will ask you to talk to a licensed professional:
Q: Should I ask you for medical advice?
ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I am not a qualified medical professional, and I cannot provide medical advice or diagnosis. If you have any health concerns or questions about your health, I recommend consulting with a qualified healthcare professional such as a doctor or a licensed medical practitioner who can provide you with personalized advice based on your specific situation and needs.
Where AI has been successful, it has supplemented existing medical personnel by giving them a scalable and flexible way to help their patients. Babylon Health was used by the UK national health service as a consumer facing chatbot. Rather than replace doctors, the AI helps provide doctors more context when they learn about a patient’s symptoms. This helps triage patients who do not need to see a doctor and helps doctors prioritize patients. Other companies use AI to empower patients directly. The CancerChatbot and OneRemission helps patients that are fighting cancer understand and navigate the difficulties of getting treatment and being remission. By empowering patients with information, doctors have an additional tool to help their patients stay on difficult regimens.
Of course, doctors and nurses are not the only parts of the healthcare system that require a large labor force. The process of making appointments, prescription refills, and insurance authorizations and payments requires many interactions between healthcare providers and their patients. These complex processes are putting ever more strain on smaller numbers of staff. Many providers have switched to phone trees and removed the option to talk to live people. However, phone trees are often inadequate to patients’ needs.
Most office activities do not require human supervision but are instead low hanging fruit for automation with better technology. Most patients still prefer to use the phone and 88 percent of patient calls are to make appointments, ask for prescription refills, or make payments. By providing offices with a conversational AI agent that understands office needs and can learn from patient interactions, First Outcomes can help patients without having them talk to an employee or getting stuck in a phone tree. First Outcomes also provides front office automation solutions that remind your patients about appointments via text and helps them fill out important paperwork before they get to the office. Because First Outcomes is AI powered, our tooling learns from previous interactions with patients and improves. Because our AI focuses on simple tasks that can easily be monitored by our and your employees, there is no risk of the conversational AI providing wrong answers. Your existing employees will have the help of new digital workers for the most routine tasks, improving their lives and allowing you to do more with less.