Patients’ social needs often get lost in health records. Generative AI could help
Housing, transportation and income constraints can impact patients’ health, and generative AI can help identify them.
Generative AI’s earliest applications in medicine have largely focused on curing not patients, but the plague of productivity physicians lose to digital documentation. Now, research suggests a way that large language models like ChatGPT could benefit both patients and providers: by automatically extracting a patient’s social needs from reams of text in their clinical records.
Factors like housing, transportation, financial stability, and community support play a critical role in patients’ health once they leave the doctor’s office. But it takes concerted effort to screen patients for gaps in these so-called social determinants of health — and even when screening occurs, this critical information is usually scattered in the rambling clinical notes that providers write each time a patient has a visit.
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