Demystifying the Patient Impact of Technology in Healthcare
Kimberly Crasta & Zihan (Ellis) Gao for the TRP | August 2022
TRP students share their latest findings at the Absolutely Interdisciplinary 2022 Conference.
Scoping Review Team: Zihan Gao (Ellis), Stephanie Jeanneret Manning, Yomna Elsheikh Ahmed, Mona Irannejad, Sally Moy, Mehrdad Farahani, Radhika Prabhune, Suzan Lorenz, Raza Mirza, and Christopher Klinger.
Communication Paradigm Team: Kimberly Crasta, Sai-Amrit Maharaj, Mohamed Abdalla, Jessica Jenkins, Siobhan Wilson, and Zihan (Ellis) Gao.
Absolute Interdisciplinary is an annual academic conference hosted by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI). The purpose of this conference is to initiate conversations between researchers across disciplines on the topic of technology and innovation.
This year, the 2022 SRI Graduate Workshop: Technologies of trust, which happened on June 20th as part of the Absolutely Interdisciplinary 2022 conference, focused on the role that trust plays in the development and implementation of these technologies.
The graduate workshop featured seven graduate groups from varying across the campus. Students from the TRP, representing two of the seven graduate groups, were invited to present on this topic. Zihan (Ellis) Gao and Radhika Prabhune presented the topic “Patient perspectives on the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare: A scoping review”, while Kimberly Crasta and Sai-Amrit Maharaj presented their findings on “The influence of inter-institutional communication on healthcare delivery: Impacts on patient quality of care and trust in the healthcare system”. During this sharing session, the TRP students brought their findings and perspectives on technology in the healthcare context.
Ellis and Radhika’s team noted that there is a lot of information on the perspectives of healthcare providers on the use of AI in patient treatment; however, there is a limited amount of data on the patient’s perceptions and perspectives use of AI in their care (figure 1).
Figure 1: The themes of discussion extrapolated from relevant articles that describe the patient perspectives on AI in healthcare.
Kim and Sai’s team observed that poor use of communication technologies can reduce the efficacy of treatments while hindering the patient’s belief that the healthcare provider can adequately manage their medical concerns (figure 2).
Figure 2: The five barriers identified as causing poor communication between healthcare providers and health institutions
While technology has been making its way into healthcare for decades, the pandemic has given us the push to acknowledge the need for better practices and awareness when coupling technology and health.
Thank you to the SRI for giving us the platform to share our work as we continue to explore this topic!