Artificial intelligence is changing the medical landscape, enhancing care and revolutionizing treatments in ways that affect senior patients specifically.
From physicians using the technology to document patient data to seniors contributing to innovations in their own care, AI is firmly installed in the medical field — a fact that presents possibility and challenge.
AI in the exam room
Dr. Fariha Sultan is an Emory Healthcare physician practicing geriatric medicine. She’s using AI to streamline and enhance her work in several ways. An AI assistant called Abridge has helped her reduce cognitive load. The technology, via app, records audio during patient visits. The result, Sultan said, has been greater engagement with patients.
“It is as easy and as simple as just pressing a button on the app, and the recording begins. Instead of looking in the chart or the computer and typing, you’re actually looking directly at the patients and giving them that attention, and they feel that they’re being listened to,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The information, she said, goes into an electronic cloud and then into the system where the provider proofreads it. This process ensures information is accurate for both physicians and patients.
Abridge is especially helpful in Sultan’s interaction with senior patients, she said, as many geriatric patients she sees take up to eight to 10 medications and want to address multiple concerns during their visits. She also encourages her patients to use AI like ChatGPT, saying she likes its aggregate nature.
“From a senior standpoint, I think the information that they are seeing is much more direct, and it’s much more valid to them,” she said. “I feel with AI, they get more filtered and more useful information, especially if they use one of the paid platforms.”
‘Knowledge is power’
Sultan also uses a platform called Doximity, the AI component which answers physicians’ prompts with answers gleaned from medical literature. The more specific the prompt, the more specific the answers, she said.
For instance, a provider looking for information on knee pain might specify in their question that the information pertain to patients who haven’t fallen.
Another physician-focused platform she uses is OpenEvidence, which is backed by references to medical articles. This method, she said, keeps her from having to search journals and gets her the most current information from official sources, which helps keep her updated overall. It also saves her time in busy days filled with paperwork and phone calls.
For patients, using AI, she said, doesn’t substitute for provider advice, but it’s a good jumping-off point, and it keeps people from having to comb through websites for specific information, which can be confusing. And ultimately, she said, this mode of searching empowers patients.
“Knowledge is power,” she said. “I tell them ‘You need to know.’ I mean, this is 2025, right?”
A scaffolding
Artificial intelligence has also proliferated in the medical aspects of an ever-evolving frontier: aging in place.
Jennifer DuBose, a director at the Georgia Health Policy Center at Georgia State University, focuses on long-term services and supports for older adults and the disabled population. She also has experience working on innovations for adults with mild cognitive impairment, a population that includes some seniors. Technology, she said, can support examination of environment and how seniors can safely continue living at home.
“I think that’s one of the big promises around technology — to be able to support being independent at home longer, to be able to remove some of the fears that family members have about mom or dad being at home by themselves by putting in this technology scaffold,” she said.
Credit: Georgia Health Policy Center
Credit: Georgia Health Policy Center
That scaffolding can involve fall detection, digital assistants and activities that help maintain cognition and encourage social engagement. DuBose pushed back on the concept that older adults are resistant to technology and posited that development of these supportive technologies should involve their ideas and preferences.
“There’s a lot of openness and interest in novelty and trying things,” she said. “The big gap that I saw is that when we don’t include people in the design and the development or identification of what technologies, they’re not as interested … I think with AI, we’ve become so enamored with the technology, with the possibility of what the technology can do, that from that, we spin off all these solutions.”
It’s important, she posited, that before embarking on that development, older adults are made part of the discovery process through expression of their actual needs and what they want to achieve.
“You find out from talking to people, ‘That’s not what I’m concerned about.’ So, it takes longer, but you get better information if you can be more open to what the ultimate user of the system is going to need,” DuBose explained.
Responsible implementation
Responsible use is another facet of what seems like the inevitable inclusion of AI in health care.
The Boston-based Coalition for Health AI works to ensure technology in the health field is developed and implemented responsibly, explained Merage Ghane, CHAI director of responsible AI. The concept of responsible AI, she said, revolves around maintenance of privacy, security of patient data and management of biases alongside preservation of transparency, usability and fairness.
In that process, it’s important that AI tools are trained with good quality data that accurately represents the aging population as seniors’ health profiles can be complex, Ghane said.
AI is now present in places like analysis of health records and test results to detect early signs of conditions like heart disease, cancer and cognitive decline so patients get rapid attention when necessary. AI in devices patients use to monitor conditions at home also allows for provider involvement through alerts, which can reduce unnecessary hospital visits.
Improved care quality, less administrative burden and more informed provider decisions are all growing offshoots of this integration, and for patients, easily accessible and more understandable information is increasing available, Ghane said. This makes AI literacy for patients and an understanding of safe and secure consumer-facing solutions even more necessary. And it makes responsibility in integrating AI into medicine critical moving forward.
One of the biggest challenges in that process, Ghane said, is that AI tools be bias-managed.
“Older adults, for instance, are often underrepresented in clinical data, which means AI tools may not always perform well for them unless specifically tested and validated,” she said. “There are also concerns around transparency, making sure patients and providers understand how AI is making decisions, and accountability.”
Part of that understanding and accountability lies in making sure health care organizations of all sizes can access resources and governance policies that allow them to implement, use and monitor AI tech effectively and safely. And safety goes back to the developmental level where developers must use responsible AI best practices and transparency so companies can choose solutions that best fit their needs.
Ultimately, collaboration across the health care field as AI integration progresses ensures its developers and users are in control of its impact, Ghane said.
“When we work together at this, we reduce risk overall for both parties (developers, and implementers/users), increase adoption and appropriate use and prioritize creating the impact we want.”
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