The Missing Code in AI: the Patient Voice| Unblock Health

The Missing Code in AI: the Patient Voice

Jan 18, 2024

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The accompanying image was created by DALL-E. 'The Missing Code in AI: The Patient Voice.' Generated image. OpenAI, [1/12/2024]

It’s crystal clear that the patient and carepartner voice is not diversely represented in the co-creation of AI-powered solutions used in patient care and patient coordination of care.

Implementation and integration of AI-powered solutions based on assumptions of what innovators, healthcare executives, and providers think patients and their families need to be successful in their care is a red flag for failure.

Don’t fail before you have even started your AI work in 2024.

Here are 4 actionable ways towards incremental improvements:

How do we start to fix this?

Prioritize commitment to incorporating the lived experience and expertise of patients into your AI co-creation and implementation cycles by ensuring that we are neither excluded nor exploited. Diverse patient representation on leadership and advisory boards is a must. Allocate budgets to fairly compensate patients for their contributions. Bookmark the Patients Included charter.
Where the heck do I even find these mystical patients?

Not being able to find a patient is an unacceptable excuse. Still justifying the “we-are-all-patients” logic? Don’t know where to begin? Check out Savvy Cooperative for all your #AskPatients needs.
Where is AI making a positive difference in daily patient care?

Great question. I couldn’t really tell you because patients don’t get a copy of any AI-powered clinical decision support outputs. Those are currently only for our providers eyes. How could we possibly know about all the potential benefits derived from AI in our care if it’s not mentioned anywhere in our records? There are countless clinical decision support tools used at the point of care to make decisions about an individual’s care or coordination of care daily. The ecosystem needs to start thinking about how we are going to get those outputs into the hands of patients and how we are going to be exchanging that information in a standardized, structured, actionable format. Transparency is key. Celebrating the positive outcomes and catching errors and bias contributes to “do no harm”.
What KPIs are most important to capture in order to assess the success of AI that is implemented?

Patient burnout is a silent public health crisis. No one is measuring it. Patient administrative burden (PAB) is a major barrier to patient on-boarding and accessing the right care at the right time. AI-powered care journeys and implementation of tech-enabled human touch, especially by way of community health workers and patient navigators, can improve techquity, decrease PAB, improve outcomes, and build trust. We need to start measuring KPIs that really matter. Capturing how we decrease PAB through the power of AI powered care is a KPI we can all prioritize.

The Missing Code in AI: the Patient Voice

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