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We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com. Back to Healio Key takeaways: Patients view AI-written portal messages as mutually beneficial to them and clinicians. Oversight and transparency are key to that comfort. Many patients report high comfort with health systems using AI-written portal messages, noting it gets them information quickly and reduces clinician workload. Their comfort comes with caveats, though. Patients want both clinician oversight and transparency that AI is being used.
\u201cPretty much everyone in our sample recognized that this could be a helpful tool,\u201d Kellie Owens, PhD, assistant professor in the department of population health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told Healio. \u201c[However], patients were very clear that they see AI not as something they wanted to replace human judgment or involvement, but something they wanted to work hand-in-hand, to make clinicians\u2019 work easier, to automate the things that can be automated, but still very much seeing the ultimate responsibility lying on the clinician to provide good care.\u201d Portal messaging increasing Healio previously reported that annual patient-authored portal messages across 2,000 hospitals and 40,000 clinics increased 153% between 2020 and 2025. Clinicians and staff authored 3.25 billion messages during that time. Prior research has shown that the increase in portal communication has contributed to both clinician burnout and dissatisfaction, according to study background. Many health care practices and institutions have started using AI to compose messages to patients to reduce clinician workload. Healio previously reported on a survey of nearly 1,500 participants that showed significantly higher satisfaction with AI-generated responses than human-written ones. However, patients also had significantly higher satisfaction if they found out messages came from clinicians instead of AI. Participants viewed vignettes of low-, medium- and high-risk messages, ranging from prescription refills to medication side effects to seeing lab results that could provoke concerns. \u201cWe wanted to do a follow-up to that survey, to chat with patients to try to understand why we saw these results,\u201d Owens said. \u201cOne of the benefits of qualitative research is being able to dive more deeply into why patients feel the way they do about AI integration, what it might mean for patient-provider relationships, what it might mean for their trust levels with their health care institutions, and ways that AI can help them in their health care journey.\u201d The study included 40 participants from the previous survey (75% women; 35% Black; 32.5% white; 25% aged 55-64 years). Perspectives on portal messaging preferences, comfort with AI responses, message content and tone, and disclosure expectations served as primary endpoints. \u2018I was surprised\u2019 Most interviewees reported portal messaging served a \u201ctransactional\u201d purpose, researchers described. The portal provides patients a pathway to get information, have questions answered or finish administrative tasks. They expect to use the portal to manage their clinical needs in a quick, concise way. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t really need to be very personal. It just needs to be quick and to the point. … You see that I\u2019m having issues, and how do I address them?\u201d one participant said. \u201cI came in with a naive assumption that the purpose of these chats with your clinician online is that you want to have some sort of human-to-human connection about something meaningful in your health care,\u201d Owens said. \u201cWhat we found is that\u2019s not really how folks use these online tools.\u201d Even patients who expressed lower comfort with AI overall had minimal issues with AI in this context. One participant noted AI reduces \u201cpersonal touch\u201d and they expressed concern over \u201closing\u201d contact with their clinician. The interviewee did not have a problem with the transactional approach in the portal, though. \u201cI\u2019m only looking for [a personal touch] in person, not online. … that\u2019s online … it\u2019s a machine, so I don\u2019t expect the interpersonal,\u201d they said. Participants reported high comfort with AI-drafted communication across message types. \u201cI was surprised,\u201d Owens said. \u201cEven in our higher medical severity examples, like, \u2018I\u2019m worried about this mass found on imaging, what can you tell me about it?\u2019 Folks still were mostly OK with AI being used in the drafting of those messages. The AI-drafted message didn\u2019t say, \u2018We think you have cancer.\u2019 It said something like, \u2018Here\u2019s a little bit more detail about what this might mean. Let\u2019s have a conversation in person or please call our office, here\u2019s how you can schedule an appointment.\u2019\u201d However, most interviewees described their comfort as conditional on clinician oversight. \u201cI feel like if AI can generate a message that the doctors feel comfortable with, and it answers all the questions that the patients have, it\u2019s a win for both the doctors and for the patients, because we\u2019re going to get responded to quicker because they\u2019re not having to sit there and generate a message from scratch and AI is going to help them to keep things moving and flowing quicker,\u201d one participant said. \u201cI think as long as there\u2019s an indication … that somebody reviewed it before they sent it, that alleviates any fears,\u201d added another. Viewpoints on message content and empathy varied considerably. Some participants preferred short responses with no personal touch. Others preferred empathy and a \u201ccustomer service\u201d tone, researchers wrote. \u201cI usually just want to get an answer. I don\u2019t need all of the extra stuff. I\u2019m not expecting [empathy] that I might expect if I were in the office with my doctor directly, but from just messaging … I don\u2019t need the empathy. I don\u2019t need \u2018I\u2019m sorry that you\u2019re feeling this way\u2019 or anything like that. I just want the answers at that point,\u201d one participant said. \u201cI really liked kindness and leading with kindness,\u201d another<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3342,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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