Artificial Intelligence (AI) Helps Improve Patient and Doctor Communication

Understanding between a patient with low health literacy and doctors can be improved with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) as per a study at the University of California - San Francisco, published in Science Advances. The study team performed a computer analysis of 250,000 secure messages, exchanged between diabetes patients and their doctors through Kaiser Permanente’s secure email portal.

It was found that most doctors use language that is too complex for their patients to understand. This helped the team uncover certain strategies on health literacy that some doctors can use to overcome communication barriers.

Moreover, several other leading health care organizations have also advised the use of simple languages for the doctors, when explaining things to their patients. This helps avoid confusion among those with the least health literacy.

As the global COVID-19 pandemic has increased the effectiveness of electronic communication among the health care industry.

Similarly, the team harnessed the power of computer algorithms and machine learning for better ways to improve patient-doctor communication — that is, to communicate in simple linguistics for effective patient care.

“There’s a combination of attitudes and skills that we discovered is critical to physician-patient communication. We were able to prove that this kind of ‘precision communication’ is important to all patients in terms of their understanding,” says Dean Schillinger, MD, professor of medicine and a primary care doctor at UC San Francisco (UCSF) and co-first author of the paper.

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Source-Medindia