The Future of AI Automation and Therapeutic Care

If you’ve looked anywhere in the past year, you’ll have noticed that AI is dominating the conversation. It’s being touted as a miracle panacea to prescribe to everything from writing emails to app-based dating. Search for just about anything on Google and you’ll see an AI Overview sitting atop the typical search engine results. It’s even entering the therapy world, where you’re starting to see discussions around the potential of AI in physical therapy, AI in occupational therapy and AI in speech therapy.

The technology is nothing short of revolutionary, but look closer, and you’ll sometimes see mixed results—one Google search went viral when a user looking for help achieving a cheesier pizza was told to add glue to the cheese mixture (the suggestion surfaced from a popular joke post on Reddit which suggested non-toxic glue, thankfully!). 

While many of these issues will likely be ironed out in time, they illustrate the importance of a human touch to verify and reign in some of the unpredictable tendencies of this nascent technology. This is especially vital when integrated within the world of healthcare, where the consequences of incorrect advice and information can be dire.

As a technology-driven SAAS company, we’re innovating every day to try to close the MSK care gap. Predictive AI, motion capture technology, machine learning—these are all tools that we use today and will continue to rely on in the future to help providers deliver effective and efficient care to their patients. That innovation also helped us to develop MedBridge Pathways, our new digital MSK care platform. 

But while these are important technological tools in our toolbelt, everything MedBridge provides or publishes has been verified by a human being. And when it comes to Pathways, our philosophy from day one remains the same—Pathways won’t disrupt the clinician-patient relationship; instead, it will empower providers to keep patients in their ecosystem for a lifetime of care. That’s because we believe that conservative care should be the first option for most MSK care patients, and that care is best delivered by expert provider staff. 

Common Fears on the Role of AI and the Future of Therapeutic Care

With each passing day, AI is becoming more sophisticated and capable of performing more complex tasks, leading to fears born from anxiety over the future of human roles in healthcare—a common concern whenever we’re on the verge of a technological leap forward. 

Such a technological leap forward occurred on September 4, 1882, the first electrical lighting in New York City illuminated the night, signaling a new technological era. But across the city, New York’s lamplighters slowly lost their livelihoods as electrical lighting became more ubiquitous. The technology undoubtedly benefited society at large, but many lost their jobs. One industry collapsed, but another— the electrician trade—emerged. On the other hand, the advent of the computer and subsequently the internet created an entire new class of jobs that previously didn’t exist before. It can be difficult to predict where new technology will take us, but in both cases, a skilled trade emerged or persisted within their industry. 

But fear of job replacement isn’t the only concern that healthcare workers have voiced when it comes to AI in physical and occupational therapy. The other common concern is a fear of reduced patient-clinician interaction.

Providers want to deliver the best hands-on care to as many patients as possible, and patients  want to know that there is a human guiding their care plan who cares about their wellbeing. The question can’t be whether or not there is human interaction in a patient-clinician interaction, the question has to be what level of human interaction is required to get the patient better. 

This isn’t a new concept—home exercise programs today don’t require constant in-person monitoring, but still rely on guidance from a clinician to help the patient get better. But if a higher-acuity patient needs more hands-on care, that human interaction needs to increase to help them reach their goals. This is a use case that AI automation is great at helping to streamline and facilitate, but shouldn’t replace the clinician.

With MedBridge Pathways, we believe that conservative care provided by expert staff should be the first option for most MSK care patients. Pathways won’t disrupt the clinician-patient relationship; instead, it empowers providers to keep patients in their ecosystem for a lifetime of care. But predictive AI and automation will be necessary to keep up and maintain efficiency in modern workflows—so where will an AI-integrated workflow fit in with expert therapeutic care?

Pathways for Every Type of Patient

With the AI-integrated workflows built into MedBridge Pathways, we can use AI to augment the existing workflow and enable clinicians to keep tabs on their patients by understanding how they are progressing in their physical therapy journey. Pathways can assist clinicians in more efficiently triaging patients based on acuity levels, leaving them with more time for hands-on care with patients who really need it.

Our standardized pathways are designed to take into account a patient’s pain, goals, and activity levels, guiding them through exercises by evidence-based progression criteria in multiple phases. We’ve designed a flexible range of pathways spanning a range of care models:

– Independent, in which patients follow a home program curated by their provider who can answer questions or make adjustments for pain and difficulty.

– For patients who need more hands-on care, hybrid-care pathways seamlessly blend these digital touchpoints with in-person care to create an efficient and effective care experience.

Augmenting, Not Replacing

Pathways is designed to assist clinicians by streamlining workflows and reducing administrative burden—it’s not designed to replace clinicians. Take motion capture: MedBridge Motion Capture is a critical component of Pathways, and can be used as an extension of your staff to track patient progress and personalize patient programs anywhere—even the patient’s living room. 

Patients can perform motion capture in the comfort of their own homes while the motion capture gathers important data points like range of motion, functional mobility, and balance compared against gold standards that the provider can later review. A dozen such could be happening in patients’ homes on their schedule, instead of having to compete with each other for a single time slot in the PT’s busy schedule. The PT can then later review each assessment, combining the information the AI-assisted motion capture has gathered with their own evaluation of the patient’s clinical diagnosis. The provider can then get each patient onto an appropriate care program faster, rather than each of them having to wait in a traffic jam to get into the PT’s office. 

Benefits of Using Pathways

Improved efficiency: Faster triage and accurate prioritization of patients make more time for high acuity patients.

Enhanced patient care: Pathways fosters better patient engagement through tools built into their programs like home exercise programs, remote monitoring, patient adherence tracking, and in-app messaging. Utilizing the app, providers can follow up with low-acuity patients, ensuring that they’re still being engaged with frequent touchpoints even though they aren’t coming into the office.

Professional growth: Hybrid care allows for a more flexible schedule for providers, and gives them the opportunity to focus on complex cases and continuous learning.

The Future of Clinician and Technological Collaboration

As AI becomes more prevalent in our daily workstreams, the role of the clinician in patient care will continue to evolve. It’s important to adapt to new tools and technologies, but also to remember the vital role that experts will always have in healthcare. EMR, diagnostic imaging, automated lab analysis, telemedicine, automated dispensing in pharmacies—at one point all of these raised some concern they’d be replacing clinicians. But even as ubiquitous as the MRI is today, it still relies on specialist knowledge and clinical judgment to interpret the information that the scan provides. The use of AI in physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy will similarly still rely on the specialist knowledge of the providers to ensure that their patients are receiving the best care possible.

What’s exciting is envisioning a collaborative future, where technology helps clinicians provide better care to more patients, faster. That’s the future MedBridge is working toward with Pathways. Want to learn more about how we can support your clinicians in their quest to help patients move better, feel better, and live better? Request a demo to see Pathways in action.