AI can also be used to automate certain aspects of pre-visit planning to make physician care encounters more efficient and rewarding for patients and physicians. This would improve the overall workflow at the physician’s office as patients can be checked in faster, physicians can view prioritized information to make visits more efficient and follow-ups can be scheduled automatically.
Another way that AI can improve practice management is through the use of chatbots that are more intelligent due to the fact that instead of being programmed, they’re trained with AI and machine learning. This helps to ensure that patients’ expectations are met and so they’ll start using those technologies more often. Chatbots can save the medical staff from having to spend a lot of time answering the same questions over the phone, and this has been used recently for the management of COVID patient calls. Web-based bots were used to answer questions, address vaccine issues, keep people out of ERs and hospitals and to manage them remotely if they were healthy enough. Once again, large language models such as ChatGPT are a game-changer here.
Patient-facing chatbots trained on medical literature with large language models and patient data can build a holistic view of a patient’s condition using multiple modalities, ranging from unstructured descriptions of symptoms to continuous glucose monitor readings and patient-provided medication logs. After interpreting this heterogeneous data, the models could interact with the patient, providing detailed advice and explanations. Importantly, these models can facilitate accessible communication, providing clear, readable or audible information on the patient’s schedule.
AI-based chatbots perform a number of functions that could improve operations at medical practices. These solutions can centralize resources, offering location-based information on the programs that are available and providing dynamic answers to specific questions about insurance. An obvious advantage of these chatbots is that they’re available 24/7. We just need to make sure that they can integrate with the scheduling tools and EHRs that are currently in use.
Another important area for medical practices and health systems is ensuring compliance with accepted guidelines and requirements from the government and insurance companies. This is especially critical in coding and billing. There’s a long history of providers and institutions engaging in the practice of upcoding, using codes that aren’t justified by the level of service provided to achieve a higher level of reimbursement. This is an area where criminal investigations and/or civil lawsuits can create headaches for organizations. As such, detecting and addressing it before the government or insurance companies discover it is important for medical organizations.
AI can help with this, both for payers and providers. As well as spotting fraud faster than human beings, it can stop it from happening in the first place. It does this by processing huge amounts of data and identifying upcoding patterns, looking for appropriate documentation and flagging anything that seems out of place. As with other areas of healthcare, it’s not designed as a replacement for existing fraud detection efforts, but rather as an enhancement that can alert human operators whenever it spots something that’s cause for concern.
