This opinion piece from Customer Faithful founder Rick Harris explores the potential for AI in healthcare to include supporting healthcare professionals in improving their empathic skills to recognise patient feelings and emotions. Far from threatening the role of clinician, AI can help time-pressured HCPs to rediscover their ‘human touch’.

AI is seemingly always in the news these days. And healthcare is seen as one of the leading sectors where AI could provide a step change in patient outcomes and efficiency.

Only this month (Nov 2023), the UK Government announced a new £100 million fund to “capitalise on AI’s game-changing potential in life sciences and healthcare”, especially in areas such as earlier diagnosis and faster drug discovery.

Yet, in last month’s PharmaTimes industry magazine feature on AI, Sneddon Campbell, a head-hunter agency in the med tech industry wrote this statement in its article - warning that “a balance must be struck between using AI for efficient diagnostics and ensuring that human healthcare professionals maintain a central role in providing emotional support and understanding to patients.”

At first glance, it’s understandable why a headhunting firm would say such a thing – to them such technology must seem a threat, fearful of AI competing with and ultimately replacing the human abilities of healthcare professionals – and of course, their business wouldn’t make as much commission if AI reduced the number of healthcare roles they could recruit and place.

Yet, this statement carries two more troubling implications and/or assumptions:

1. that AI has no role in recognising patient emotions

2. that HCPs are the “central” providers of emotional support

On the first point, AI is already well-developed in identifying patient emotion. Natural Language Processing (NLP) – a subset of AI - has grown hugely in recent years, now able to accurately assess and categorise tens of thousands of emotion words and phrases, taken from patient interactions such as video consultations or interviews.

These analytics can, for example, help spot areas of concern in the patient’s journey such as where people feel anxious, confused or scared, lonely or exposed, angry or frustrated. From these patterns in qualitative interviews, more quantitative assessments can be developed, including adding interventions aimed at improving emotional quality of life (eQOL) outcomes.

On the second point, whilst HCPs can provide emotional support, there is evidence that “central” roles, such as a patient’s lead consultant, falls well short in this skill.

Indeed, The Times newspaper, as part of its year-long Times Health Commission, highlighted comments from Rob Behrens, the Ombudsman investigating complaints regarding the NHS, warning that the quality of care in some hospitals was undermined by the “hierarchical and high-handed attitude of clinicians” and concluded that “there was a deep-seated lack of empathy in the medical profession.” When Behrens was asked whether one of the problems was a “consultant is king” attitude in the NHS, he said there was “an element of that, absolutely”.

Patient-reported statistics reflect this concern too, with 10 percent of all complaints to the NHS being about staff values and behaviours. In 2022-23 this totalled 19,081 written complaints to the NHS hospital and community health services in that category.

So, rather than Sneddon Campbell disparagingly sub-titling its article in PharmaTimes as “Can AI replace the human touch in healthcare provision?”, it might instead look positively to AI to help improve the very “human touch” skills in identifying and acknowledging feelings and emotions that patients deserve and need, but that healthcare professionals demonstrate too infrequently.

About the Author

Rick Harris is the founder of Customer Faithful, a research-led consultancy. Customer Faithful’s work in diseases such as chronic migraine, multiple myeloma and leukaemia is breaking new ground in uncovering unmet need, truly revealing the voice-of-the-patient and demonstrating the impact of treatments and service pathways for patients and those that care for them.

Click here for details on our patient experience research, or contact info@customerfaithful.com.