With advancements such as artificial intelligence being hailed as the solution to healthcare workforce challenges and the mismatch between demand and supply, Gareth Iacobucci reports on how interactions between doctors and patients are changing
At the Nuffield Trust’s 2024 summit in early March The BMJ hosted a panel discussion, at which experts discussed what the increasing reliance on and use of tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) means for the relationship between clinicians and patients.
### The panellists (chair: Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief, The BMJ )
The panellist Rebecca Rosen, a GP and senior fellow at the Nuffield Trust, says that AI has great promise in general practice as a digital triage tool, where she says that it’s increasingly being used to “filter patients’ needs at the front door.” In terms of diagnosing, however, she says that technology isn’t yet sophisticated enough to capture “the nuanced, complicated world of general practice with undifferentiated illness and a mix of physical and psychological and social.”
Her fellow panellist Juliet Bouverie, chief executive of the Stroke Association, says that while AI is “underdeveloped” in primary care, some progressive GPs are using population health data and the application of AI to segment and understand which patients have the most complex needs. She says that some GPs are then able to target longer review meetings with those patients, such as …