Challenges in AI-patient interaction

What are the challenges in patient-AI interactions? How can these be tackled?

ERIK RANSCHAERT: For me, there are two major challenges. The one, the first challenge is, of course, to convince patients to use this correctly, and to use it in their benefit. So they have to be well aware of how it’s going to be used, what the data will be used for. On the other hand, the clinicians will also have to adapt the management of these applications. They will have to find a way to respond to all the information they obtain from these solutions. And that might be another challenge.

ANNAMARIA ANNICCHIARICO: Patients can use directly the data, only if they are very easy to be read, and also if they are useful for concrete and day-to-day actions. So it is important if we obtain results that can be read directly by patients. Otherwise, it is better if these data are monitored directly by doctors, or, in some cases, by caregivers.

RENATO CUOCOLO: The main issue here is that the patient can both come to rely too much on the data, and therefore make wrong assumptions on his or her own health, both in terms of overestimating and underestimating the situation. General education on the possibilities and limitations of systems is necessary to avoid unnecessary burdens on the healthcare system, as well as ignoring potentially dangerous situations from the part of the patient.

OLIVER EMMLER: One of the challenges is leaving patients alone with information systems, which they cannot properly judge or understand, from the background perspectives, even for, let’s say, very simple search engines, on the web. It’s hard for people to understand how they come up with results, and how these results should be handled with an AI system with several levels of decision-making and weights, which they use for coming up with some results. It might be even harder for patients, even for medical doctors, to judge on these systems, and to verify these systems provide good results. So leaving patients alone is a challenge in healthcare currently, with information technology.

And guiding them, in the future, to use the right systems, to use them right, or guiding them to use these systems, might be a new area of expertise, a new area for jobs for physicians, to help patients to interact with these systems.