Osteopathic medical education: High touch integrates high tech

Osteopathic medical colleges are exploring how to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into education, with national efforts underway to guide colleges on adopting these tools at the right pace and in effective ways. American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine President & CEO Robert A. Cain, DO, FACOI, FAODM, emphasized using AI to support patient-centered, high-touch care so physicians can focus more on face-to-face interactions while reducing waste and improving the overall care experience.

Medical Economics: What are some ways you anticipate that osteopathic medical colleges will integrate, and maybe already are integrating, artificial intelligence (AI) programs into their instruction?

Robert A. Cain, DO, FACOI, FAODME: At the national level, in the association, we're actually trying to wrestle with that question. We've actually brought on special advisers to help us with that question, as we try to work in partnership with our colleges to figure out exactly how do you integrate this and the key here is to not be too slow and not be too early, right? To learn what we need to learn, so that whatever we integrate and we do well. The interesting thing for us has been a conversation about, can AI be used to help us get back to the things we think are most important? And throughout this this interview, I've been talking about the importance of putting the patient at the center of the experience. But if we think about experiences in the past two decades with the rise of technology, all too often, the physician’s looking this way, and the patient's back here, and the conversation isn’t eye-to-eye, face-to-face in the way it should be. As DOs, it's about, as I mentioned, where do our hands, in terms of the use of manual medicine, fit into this care that can't be done with a computer? And as we think about things like ambient scribing that can potentially listen to what's happening in the room, let me, as a physician, be able to pay attention to you and give you the time that you actually deserve. What we're hoping is to in our classrooms and in our experiences, integrate AI and other technologies in a way that allow us to maintain the high-touch history, the high-healing-touch history that we've had with the high tech that I think is available to us, to offer a form of precision care to you that ultimately, down the road, done right, improves the relationship with the patient and allows us to have less waste in the experience in the system, in terms of testing and unnecessary diagnoses that aren't really going to help to make you better and realize your health potential.