Outlining the Impact of AI on Multidisciplinary Oncology Practice

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help document and automate many facets of the clinical process, alleviating clinician burnout and giving them more face time with patients, according to Arturo Loaiza-Bonilla, MD, MSEd, FACP.

CancerNetwork® spoke with Loaiza-Bonilla, systemwide chief of Hematology and Oncology at Saint Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN), about how the emergence of AI-powered technologies has impacted how he conducts his clinical practice.

Loaiza-Bonilla began by outlining the current landscape of emerging AI technologies, highlighting continuous new releases resulting in an adjustment period for many healthcare professionals. He then explained that his practice has adapted precision medicine in clinical trials and used AI to summarize patient notes, test for biomarkers, identify practice optimization, and reduce documentation burden, the latter of which he expresses may serve to alleviate physician burnout.

Emphasizing a dramatic shift in the application of AI technology, Loaiza-Bonilla suggested that the use of AI to automate documentation processes could save clinicians hours each day, allowing them to spend more time addressing patients’ needs. Furthermore, he explained that although oncology is patient-centric, all facets of clinical practice, across a range of clinical specializations, will be impacted by the ongoing emergence of AI.

Loaiza-Bonilla then discussed AI integration for patient use in ways that are sensible to them. He further emphasized a need to establish and maintain trust with emerging AI tools so that providers can spend more time engaging with patients and ultimately serve as better physicians and more empathetic human beings. Ethically trusting AI technologies, he expressed, will help healthcare professionals in optimizing their daily practice.

Transcript:

AI has taken all of us by storm. We have seen almost daily releases of new tools and news about the different stakeholders since the advent of ChatGPT and others. We are still in the process of learning, but [regarding] my practice itself, I am an AI enthusiast, so we are trying to incorporate as many of those algorithms as possible on a daily basis. It has changed my approach to oncology, particularly around what we call precision medicine in clinical trials. I have been using it for several years in clinical trial matching from a patient-centric perspective because all that is data organization. We can use those technologies to summarize the patient notes, emerge biomarkers that the patient was tested on or not, and then find opportunities for optimization of treatments, or at least make my life easier documenting.

There has been a dramatic shift in how we approach these tools to make our lives easier. We were burned out—and we still are—by menial tasks such as documentation, just for billing, instead of focusing on patients. Saving hours of a day by using these tools has made a [significant] difference. Oncology is a multi-disciplinary specialty where the patient is at the center of the whole experience. We have radiologists, pathologists, surgeons, genetic counselors, lab processes around that, infusion chairs, and clinical trials, and all of them have been touched by the AI Cambrian explosion that has been happening over the last couple of years.

The focus, now, is how we integrate things that make sense to the patient and to the use cases to make our lives easier, and [how] we can trust those AI tools in a meaningful way so we can devote more time to talk to patients, be more empathetic, and go into the vocations that we went for and see what the ground truth is that we can leverage. [The focus is also] to be better physicians and become not only better human beings, but also ethically trust that these technologies are going to be helping us in our daily practice.