by Rohini Kundu & Team AHT
Can you imagine a machine holding your hand and making sense of your conversation with your doctor? The doctor-patient conversation has always been integral to the treatment and healing process.
Having the proper conversation with your doctor builds empathy and trust and ultimately aids in treating whatever you are suffering from. But what if we can have a better conversation with our doctors? Google’s latest brainchild, the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), has set out to do just that. It is a chatbot that will help doctors have better conversations with their patients, ultimately fostering empathy and quality of care.
Why is doctor-patient conversation important?
Imagine a scenario, where in you arrive in the Emergency Room with a fractured arm. You are scared and in a lot of pain and want to see the doctor immediately. The doctor arrives, looking uninterested and annoyed that they must attend to another patient.
With minimal effort to build rapport with you, the doctor takes your clinical history and leaves without saying much. Now, give us an honest answer: would you go to a doctor like this? This genuine scenario shows the importance of a good conversation between doctors and their patients.
Here are some benefits of having a good conversation with your doctor:
- Early detection and accurate diagnoses: When there is trust between a patient and their doctor, they will feel more comfortable sharing information about their health. This will lead to an accurate diagnosis of the diseases they are suffering from. Listening to the patient carefully will help the physician read between the lines and detect issues early.
- Addressing a patient’s anxieties: When a person comes to a doctor, they are often at their most vulnerable state. They need that reassurance from their doctor that things will be just fine. Having an open conversation and building trust ensures the patient’s emotional well-being.
- Holistic understanding of a patient’s condition: A patient is a layperson. They will need help to speak or understand medical jargon. When they talk about what they are suffering from, doctors might often miss vital issues around their lifestyle that might be causing the condition. When doctors have good conversations with their patients, they might have a more holistic understanding of their conditions, thus offering a better treatment plan.
A new era of medical diagnostics with AMIE
A team of researchers at Google Research, led by Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan, have developed an artificial intelligence system named Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE). It is designed like a chatbot to talk to patients and discuss possible diagnoses with doctors. Real-world datasets were used to build AMIE, which includes medical question-answering with multiple choice questions, medical reasoning with long-form questions, and recorded medical conversations.
AMIE’s performance was tested by a conversation with simulated patients who were trained actors.The data collected was compared to the same interview conducted by 20 board-certified primary care physicians. The results showed that AMIE could have conversations that were at par with those that the primary care physicians have with their patients.
It showed capability in having conversations that were accurate and empathetic. However, this technology has shortcomings.
Two significant obstacles that researchers faced were:
- Actual data from real-life conversations might not be complete and cover all possible medical conditions and scenarios.
- Real-life conversations usually have slang, sarcasm, jargon, and interruptions that can affect AMIE’s capabilities as a chatbot.
Researchers devised a self-play-based simulated learning environment to counter these obstacles. In their blog post, Google’s researchers have highlighted these limitations and emphasized why addressing them is essential.
Google’s AMIe, although innovative, is not the first of its kind. With the boom of generative AI, chatting with the algorithm about your symptoms is all the rage.
Ada Health is the market’s most popular symptom assessment tool, with 13 million users. Daniel Nathrath, CEO of Ada Health, even feels the app might become a standard diagnostic tool for doctors. Sensely’s virtual assistants, Molly, and similar assistants like, Healthily, SUKI, Florence are similar technologies bringing revolution to how we diagnose diseases and improve patient – care ecosystems.
The future of AI in healthcare
Google’s AMIE is a promising tool that can completely transform the current healthcare scenario.This technology is not meant to replace doctors but instead help them make better decisions when treating their patients. It can foster a better, empathetic relationship between patients and doctors and aid physicians in diagnosing diseases. However, before this system is implemented on a large scale, it is crucial to evaluate the technology. AMIE should undergo rigorous testing before being made available publicly. Only then can we fully understand its benefits and harness its full potential.
