Generative AI: A game-changer for primary care physicians

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What an exciting time to be a part of the health care industry! Advancements and discoveries are happening at an incredible pace. And right now, the advancement that shows the most potential for positive change is generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). This game-changing technology is being embraced by large pharmaceutical companies and health care networks worldwide. But it also has immense potential on the front lines: the primary care physicians, especially independent ones who run their own practice. From newborn care to aging support, from a clinic’s emergency department doctors to its human resources staff, generative AI can enhance a practice’s level of care.

GenAI for better patient care

Jassi Chadha
© Axtria

Generative AI is already making inroads in patient relations and outcomes. One practical example is a GenAI-based patient care companion. This solution analyzes a patient’s unique medical history, their current symptoms, their test results, and even what they like or dislike about their treatment. The GenAI solution considers all this information and generates customized outreach to the patient with the goal of greater empathetic advice. Reminders and patient-specific insights can improve treatment adherence, with messages and interventions relayed directly to the patients. A comprehensive patient analytics platform like this can also provide valuable insights and visualizations to the primary care physician, giving them timely and accurate disease information when they need it most.

A traditional AI system is robust in its ability to manage numerous records. It helps avoid the errors that can happen when clinical information is accidentally duplicated in patient files. AI has already proven itself to physicians through efficiencies like this. It also helps avoid burn-out, by handling the time-consuming filing and organizing tasks. Now, however, we can take that a step further. A GenAI system can directly benefit a primary care doctor as they’re in the exam room with their patient. GenAI parses that mountain of data, and with its ability to reason, it can make connections that would take a human far longer to uncover. It can provide doctors with suggested follow-up questions during an exam, summarize previous exam notes and warn about potential aberrations in test results. This elevates the experience for the patient, fostering better trust in their physician.

GenAI for better physician workflow

Another tangible benefit of GenAI for physicians and clinicians in practice is context-relevant content creation. A GenAI system can help an independent physician write successful insurance appeals faster and more accurately, thus easing what may be a stressful situation for their patients. For clinicians who face the challenge of rare diseases, GenAI is even more of a game-changer. It can generate new, medically meaningful content to accelerate the development of treatment protocols and can summarize the progress of clinical studies.

GenAI is also adept at processing “unstructured” data. That means being able to take handwritten notes, audio recordings from exams or imaging from tests, and processing that just as easily as the data in a spreadsheet. That becomes a significant time-saver for doctors running their own practice.

GenAI: getting us back to our roots

Companies such as Axtria are pioneering the ability to leverage GenAI to revolutionize patient and physician care, as well as advance core information management capabilities like master data and multi-modal data. We’re creating automated medical inquiry insights that offer clients summaries of medical inquiry clusters using large language models.

Since antiquity, the mission of every physician has been to heal their patients. For those of us in the industry, better patient outcomes are the ultimate measure of success, more so than a line somewhere in an accounting sheet. As time progressed, we slipped into the background, with physicians treating symptoms and pharma developing medication. Now, GenAI has a chance to bring us all to the forefront again.

It can handle the repetitive tasks, it can handle the deep-dive research and analysis, and it can handle the time-sink tasks that take us away from our patients. GenAI is constantly proving its ability to bring us back to our roots: the full-attention, one-on-one interactions with our patients; the two-way conversations that are needed to solve a problem. GenAI is allowing us to return the human factor to those interactions once again. It is allowing us to reintroduce art to the science of medicine, and become a trusted partner in our patients’ health journey.

Jaswinder “Jassi” Chadha is a successful serial entrepreneur who founded Axtria. In less than 15 years he has led its global growth as president and CEO to a 3,500+ person enterprise serving dozens of clients in more than 50 countries, including a majority of the world’s top global life-sciences enterprises and several in the Fortune 50.