Anna Escalé, doctor and member of the Digital Health group of the Catalan Society of Family and Community Medicine (Camfic).
Day iArtificial intelligence is increasingly present in the health field, but it has less prominence in Primary Care consultations. The doctor and member of the Digital Health group of the Catalan Society of Family and Community Medicine (Camfic), Anna Escaléasks that Primary Care be involved in research on artificial intelligence and the “commitment and dedication of the Administration to gradually incorporate these tools into Primary Care consultations”.
Escalé, who works in Primary Care at a center of the Catalan Health Institute (ICS) in Central Catalonia, explains the need that the Primary Care is present in the studies that validate the tools of artificial intelligence. “It is essential that you have our criteria. The involvement of Primary Care is needed from the beginning in the development of algorithms to help them become really useful tools in clinical practice”, she details.
Regarding health professionals, he assures in an interview with Medical Writing what “we have to be involved from the first moment to be able to validate the tools and that we can benefit from them”.
Is artificial intelligence implemented in queries?
The implementation of artificial intelligence in first-level care consultations is already taking place, although still “very incipient”. However, Escalé states that “we cannot turn our backs on the implementation of new technologies in our consultations because, among other things, they will allow us to move towards a more personalized and individualized medicine”.
“The use of predictive models can help us individualize screeningalso see the reinforcement measures in therapeutic adherence, and where they are really already quite developed and can help us as a diagnostic support tool for consultations, is in the analysis of images such as X-rays, dermatological images or electrocardiograms , among others”, adds the doctor. Escalé stresses that new technologies “They should help us to do those tasks that do not really require a physical examination and that, therefore, they can help us to debureaucratize care tasks“. All this must allow health professionals “have more time to do other tasks that only we can do ‘in vivo'”.
This advance should guarantee “greater effectiveness and efficiency in resolving queries,” she maintains. The member of Camfic’s Digital Health group argues that if artificial intelligence “helps us diagnose professionals faster and with greater diagnostic accuracy, this has repercussions on the patient saving time, speed, effectiveness and efficiency”.
“We are a specialty that encompasses everything, but at the same time we are the professionals who know the patient’s environment, their background and their community and family context; this supposes a global vision that is essential when we have to make health decisions,” he alleges.
Do doctors have enough training in AI?
Although there is more and more involvement and projects that combine Primary Care and artificial intelligence in Catalonia, such as the Salut/IA project and the TIC Salut Social Foundation, from Camfic it is requested that the pace of the Administration’s commitment to establish these tools go hand in hand with the advancement of new technologies. In that sense, “It is important that family doctors train in artificial intelligence because we will have to work with it. More training is needed in this area,” acknowledges Escalé.
The doctor comments that artificial intelligence is a new field in the field of health and that “Create multidisciplinary teams that include health professionals and engineering technicians”. In this way, health workers will be able to get involved in the development of technology to make it more effective and efficient and thus the result will take more into account the reality of day-to-day care and will be focused on practice.
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