Artificial intelligence can help optimize eye care practices
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WAILEA, Hawaii — Artificial intelligence can help eye care practices cut down on inefficient tasks, according to a speaker at Retina 2024.
Wes Strickling said AI is one of the biggest topics in health care, and there are several ways ophthalmology can currently use it to ensure better patient care.
“We’ve got things that are redundant and labor intensive and repetitive,” he said. “We want to get those out. Staff shortages bring this to the fore.”
That is why automation is one of the most important ways AI is helping in ophthalmology, Strickling said. One example involves insurance verification.
Practices can use automated bots built using AI to scrape sites and grab information they need. Tasks like this could take humans an hour or more, but a purpose-built bot can get the job done in 5 minutes, Strickling said.
“Extrapolate that across 100 offices, and you save a lot of money and a lot of time to get the same results,” he said.
AI can also help practices optimize tasks by completing them more efficiently.
“One of the biggest struggles I know is no-shows and when the schedule is not optimized,” Strickling said. “In order to have the most effective and efficient scheduling, we have to have those schedules filled right.”
Strickling said AI does a good job of filling canceled appointments with the next available patient with a similar appointment. Whether it is a comprehensive appointment or surgical follow-up, AI will find the next patient with the same kind of appointment to fill that hole in the schedule, Strickling said.
“That type of optimization is what AI is best at,” he said. “You would have to have a human scraping the schedule looking for things for, again, an hour, and [AI] can do it in 2 minutes.”
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Strickling W. Real world applications of AI in ophthalmology. Presented at: Retina 2024; Jan. 13-19, 2024; Wailea, Hawaii.
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