AI preassessment calls may streamline clinics
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
SAN FRANCISCO — A phone preassessment using artificial intelligence showed potential for streamlining clinics, according to a study presented at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting.
Ernest Lim, BSc, MBBS, said demands on ophthalmic services are rising, with a lot of the work becoming more “burnout inducing.”
“We could use our allied health professionals — optometrists, specialist nurses, technicians — to try to get them to do some of this work for us, but they are also stretched,” he said. “Can we use some of the latest AI natural language processing technologies to automate some of the stuff that humans have historically done?”
Lim and colleagues conducted a single-site service evaluation to audit the use of an AI automated telephone conversation as an alternative to clinician preoperative history taking.
Lim said the AI telephone conversation asked each patient questions that made up a cataract preoperative assessment report, including questions about medical history, drug history, tolerance to local anesthesia, as well as social and mobility history.
Out of 177 patients who answered the call, 153 completed it, Lim said. The average age of the patients was 76 years. A human clinician labeled each answer blind to what the AI program understood from the call, with a 96% agreement.
“The completion rates are pretty similar to other studies using phone-based preassessments in the U.K. and U.S. ... There’s real potential to streamline clinics,” Lim said. “We absolutely need to validate this against the ground truth of what happens when the patients come in, and we need to look at implementation holistically.”
Collapse
Lim E, et al. Initial results of AI voice automation of preoperative assessment for ophthalmic surgery. Presented at: American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting; Nov. 3-6, 2023; San Francisco.
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts