The chief medical officer of Providence Medical Group, Serene Perkins, spoke about the role of artificial intelligence, or AI, in health care at a conference on AI innovation Feb. 28 in Anchorage.
She outlined the AI tools Providence is already using across its network of health care facilities in Alaska and in six other states.
She said one AI tool Providence has incorporated uses artificial intelligence to analyze patient messages to providers. It identifies patients with the highest immediate risk so a health care provider can respond quickly.
“Things like suicidal ideation,” Perkins said. “We need to get that to the top of the inbox. We need to make sure that there is a mental health counselor that can get in touch with that person right away.”
Perkins said the AI tool adheres to HIPAA, The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal law protecting patients’ privacy.
She said the biggest potential for AI interventions in the long term are for managing chronic disease and illness.
“The more that we can use AI to really attack those and be able to monitor patients on a much more frequent basis and prevent them from getting to the place where they have to be hospitalized, because once they're at that higher level of care, or need a surgery, the complications go up exponentially,” Perkins said.
She said Providence also recently started a program that incorporates wearable glucose monitors with AI to help manage diabetes.
Perkins said as a patient, she experienced the benefits of AI when her physician used an AI transcription note-taking service during her annual physical exam.
“To be able to sit there and have a 20-minute face-to-face conversation where she's not worrying about forgetting anything that I'm saying and I'm not watching her type on the computer, turned away from me, I experienced it myself, the transformation,” Perkins said.
But she said using AI is a big responsibility. “We have to be in charge of it.”
Perkins said there's potential in the future for AI to help manage other kinds of chronic disease, like depression or cancer. But she said, for now, Providence is sticking to using artificial intelligence for diabetes and heart health care. She said once they get those applications right and can show patient outcomes are improving, they can explore using AI to aid treatment of other health conditions.
