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Originally published August 8, 2024
Last updated September 19, 2024
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Artificial intelligence can change the way doctors and patients experience office visits. Jamal Nabhani, MD, a urologist with USC Urology, part of Keck Medicine of USC, discusses how AI could help bring back the joy of medicine.
One of the ways AI is already helping physicians is by documenting patient visits. Physicians can let AI do the ambient listening while they instead focus on talking to the patient.
Once the appointment is over, AI can transcribe and record the visit, saving the physician time on the back end. “When you’re a procedure-based specialist or a primary care physician, the majority of what you’re doing is going back to rehash what happened during the appointment just for the purpose of documentation,” says Dr. Nabhani. “But it’s redundant.”
AI systems are now being trained to focus on recording clinical details only. “They’re not going to transcribe the part of the visit when you and your patient talked about baseball or their kid’s graduation; instead, it hones in on the medically relevant pieces of information,” Dr. Nabhani says.
As it evolves, AI is also getting better at ambient listening. “With the advent of large language models, it’s come a long way in a very short time,” he says.
Perhaps even more important than what AI can do during a patient’s visit is what it can do before a patient even visits at all. Before the patient comes in for an office visit, for instance, AI can ask the patient the standard questions their doctor would normally ask at the beginning of each visit.
“As a urologist, many times I’m asking the same general questions to each patient at the start of each visit,” Dr. Nabhani explains. “I’d love to have those answers already in hand at the beginning of an appointment. I want to know what’s going on with the patient before I’m face-to-face with them; I don’t want to spend more time in the clinic extracting the information from the patient. I want to spend the majority of the 15 or 30 minutes I have with my patient actually talking about their treatment plan or answering their questions.”
Doctors will still need to do their due diligence before an appointment. “If you’re asking patients to answer questions ahead of time, you’ll have to review their answers before you walk into the patient’s room,” Dr. Nabhani says. “You have to know your stuff going in.”
Physicians and patients will need time to adjust to an AI-integrated workflow, Dr. Nabhani says. But change is imminent.
“I think that in a very short amount of time — probably less than five years — AI will be in charge of a lot of these mundane tasks,” he predicts. “And it’s really something that needs to happen. People aren’t going to be losing their jobs, either; we’re just going to be freeing people up to do what they were actually meant to do in medicine. Instead, we’ve been acting in service to the electronic medical records rather than to the patient.”
AI will never replace what a human doctor provides, Dr. Nabhani says. “At the end of the day, a lot of people just want to see a person. They don’t want everything to be automated.”
A little automation, however, can be good. For instance, AI can help familiarize a patient with a doctor before a visit by taking the form of the doctor’s avatar. This avatar can ask the patient questions just as the doctor would. “The patient will already have heard their doctor talk and interact with them in a virtual way,” Dr. Nabhani says. “The patient can evaluate, ahead of time, the doctor’s mannerisms and whether or not they feel comfortable with the doctor.”
“AI can really bring the joy back to medicine instead of doctors having to ask the same questions 15 times in one day and comb through the information afterward,” he adds. “If we can leverage AI to do things that otherwise take the joy out of a provider’s job, I think there is opportunity here. Hopefully, AI can significantly change and improve health care.”
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