The health systems of some countries, the US but also the United Kingdom in the first place, are using devices equipped with artificial intelligence capable of carrying out a triage
A decade ago, chat with a virtual assistant (a chatbot) identifying symptoms and talking to your doctor via videoconference might seem like a rarity. In some health systems – mainly of a private nature like in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, home of welfare – chatbots and telemedicine are already an integral part of health services. Certainly Covid has given a significant boost to this integration, forcing healthcare to turn to online solutions with physical restrictions in place. Second Bertalan Meskó, director of the Medical Futurist Institute of Budapest, “Virtual visits and chatbots are effective ways to bring patient care anywhere, they don’t need much updating as all you need to get started is a smartphone and an internet connection.” “This ease of access to quality care represents the new boundary in primary care. We won’t need to see a doctor for every minor health issue; we will simply share the symptoms with a chatbot that can provide advice or connect us to an online doctor. ‘
Virtual reality
In the near future, therefore, we will arrive at truly virtual forms of medical examination? Maybe with avatars? “I think so, but for the sub-clinical level. I have some doubts instead for mental pathologies in which the change process also passes through the relational dynamics with the therapist “, he replies Giuseppe Riva, professor of Psychotechnology for well-being at the Catholic University of Milan where he directs the Humane Technology Lab. Professor Riva is also the coordinator of the project «COVID Feel Good“, a self-help protocol created precisely through virtual reality (VR) to overcome the psychological distress generated by the Coronavirus (covidfeelgood.com) which involved Istituto Auxologico Italiano Irccs, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and the startup Become. It is a free protocol validated with a randomized clinical trial both national, therefore only with Italian data, and with European data because then the experience was a great success (12/15 thousand users) and has been translated into 13 languages.
Non-verbal aspects
«What it tells us the psychology of comuni
cation however is that videoconferencing significantly reduces the transmission of the non-verbal aspects of communication. In fact, in videoconference, only the faces are visible. This implies the loss of all information from the non-verbal body signals: posture and body movements, haptic (through touch, ed) and proxemics. Moreover, very often, the different non-verbal components of the message – the tone and intonation of the voice, its speed and volume – are also distorted by low bandwidth or connection problems, further reducing the tuning capacity. Because of this, if the subjects do not know each other well, this reduces the level of empathy within the relationship and produces a significant increase in the cognitive resources necessary to express oneself effectively and understand what is communicated ”, explains Riva.
Fundamental involvement also for data lakes
But does technological innovation bring closer and facilitate the relationship of care between doctor and patient? “I believe the answer is yes. Patient involvement is key in collecting the information necessary to feed the data-lake (a reservoir of raw data, ed). The patient understands that it serves to improve his own diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic path and generally participates in a more conscious way “, underlined Carlo Tacchetti, director of the Irccs Hospital San Raffaele Experimental Imaging Center in a recent meeting organized by Microsoft eHealth Experience.
“High tech – high touch” approach
“Dematerialized prescription, conference call with the patient, appointments and requests for drugs booked via smartphone, evaluation of pulse oximetry and other remote parameters, are tools of the present and even more of the future. The risk is that they are considered to replace and not supplement the relationship with the doctor », he stresses Sergio Pillon, coordinator of digital transformation in the Asl of Frosinone, Lazio Region. “Technology gives us visual presence, remote stethoscope and laryngoscope and increasingly advanced technologies but medicine is empathy, looking into each other’s eyes, talking but also touching the patient., see its body language and not just listen to it speak. Stanford University defines this “high tech – high touch” approach, more technology but for a closer contact with the doctor, not to avoid contact ».
January 16, 2022 (change January 16, 2022 | 19:21)
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