The AI bot will see you now: how technology is changing the doctor-patient relationship

What’s the reality of AI’s use in UK primary care?

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 …