Diagnosis, treatment and self-management—these are the key tasks that challenge most physicians. And any resource that makes them faster or more efficient is a godsend.
New AI tools can simplify a physician’s work life, once a user has figured out how to integrate it into a practice, according to Colleen Kraft, MD. She is an AMA member, past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a practicing pediatrician, and a professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.
The AMA House of Delegates uses the term augmented intelligence (AI) as a conceptualization of artificial intelligence that focuses on AI’s assistive role, emphasizing that its design enhances human intelligence rather than replaces it.
In an episode of “AMA Update,” Dr. Kraft detailed how AI can help pediatricians improve care.
“If you think about diagnosis, think about treatment, think about self-management, those are the areas that I would like to see” with more AI, she said. “Technology that helps me get the right children in the right lines when it comes to specialists is going to be really important, and anything that we can do diagnostically—or better screening within primary care—that will be efficient and cost-effective and take the burden off our patients.”
“It takes so long to get in to see therapists. If there are some technologies that can really help out with my children in terms of socialization, in terms of reading, in terms of other types of medical diagnoses that they have—great,” Dr. Kraft said. “Let's bring it on.”
AI can also help physicians and staff teach patients self-management.
“The real cure for a lot of particularly developmental and behavioral conditions is really in teaching the patients what to do, what not to do, and how to practice that in your day-to-day life. Technology that will do that will help us too,” she said.
All starts with diagnosis
“I had two children come in a couple of months ago. One was a 4-year-old boy with a diagnosis of autism. The other was a 2-year-old girl, his sister, who had speech delay, couldn't eat, had difficulty with behaviors,” she related. “And the task was this—the parents had moved from another state.”
Insurance was requiring that that 4-year-old be rediagnosed with autism before he could get services. And the family had another child with a clear disability, she said.
Dr. Kraft’s practice uses an AI tool called Canvas Dx to address the issue.
“This technology took a child who would have had a 9- to 12-month wait to see a specialist and was able to make those diagnoses in days. So the diagnostic part is really, really important,” she said. “What Canvas Dx was able to do, by taking parents' information, my assessment and then videos of the child that the parents took on their phones, was renegotiate that diagnosis of autism with the 4-year-old. The 4-year-old got the diagnosis, was able to get into the early childhood special education system and able to get into the therapies that really helped him out,” she said.
And the 2-year-old, as it turned out, did not have autism but had some major difficulty with speech, and Canvas Dx was able to give her a block diagram of her strengths and her challenges.
“So, we could sit down with the parents and say, your child really needs to see a speech therapist. Six months later, she was diagnosed with speech apraxia, which is problems with the muscles around the mouth. She was given the right therapy and soon she was talking, and she was eating.”
According to the technology’s maker, Cognoa, Canvas Dx is a Food and Drug Administration-authorized diagnostic tool that helps physicians and other health professionals “accurately diagnose or rule out autism in children ages 1.5 to 6 years, better plan for next steps and unlock services.”
In November, the AMA House of Delegates adopted as policy a comprehensive set of principles addressing the development, deployment use of health care AI (PDF), with particular emphasis on:
- Health care AI oversight.
- When and what to disclose to advance AI transparency.
- Generative AI policies and governance.
- Physician liability for use of AI-enabled technologies.
- AI data privacy and cybersecurity.
- Payer use of AI and automated decision-making systems.
An AMA Ed Hub™ CME series introduces learners to foundational principles in AI and machine learning, a subdomain of AI that enables computers to learn patterns and relationships from data without being explicitly programmed by people. Developed by the AMA ChangeMedEd initiative and the University of Michigan DATA-MD team and geared toward medical students, it is also suitable for residents, fellows, practicing physicians and other health professionals.
From AI implementation to EHR adoption and usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors—not a burden.
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Coping with burnout
Dr. Kraft noted that a new trend emerging in mental health technology is more efficient ways of teaching patients’ self-management skills in therapy sessions.
“How could you actually learn some of the cognitive-behavioral therapy skills? How could you do some of the speech and language types of things that might be important for that child to grow and to develop?
This is something where technology can really, really be helpful for our families,” she said.
AI might not be for everyone, however. Adoption of AI technology should not be automatic, she added. “I look to see where it first fits in the workflow of my office day. Is it something my nurses can do? Is it something I have to do? How do the patients access the technology?”
“Pilot it out,” she recommended. “Do it on two or three patients. If it works for these two or three patients, what worked well? What didn't work well? Is it worth trying again? Or is it something that we should just scrap and do things the way we've been doing them? How does it integrate with what I use day to day? I have to be able to bill and code and get paid for it to be able to use it.”
“AMA Update” is your source for physician-focused news. Hear from physicians and other experts on trending public health concerns, practice issues and more—because who’s doing the talking matters. Catch every episode by subscribing to the AMA’s YouTube channel or listen to all AMA podcasts at ama-assn.org/podcasts.
