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There has been growing interest around the use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the working practices of doctors and nurses to make them more efficient. A recent presentation at the Large Urology Group Practice Association (LUGPA) 2023 Annual Meeting suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform urology practices by making the work of doctors and nurses more efficient and improving patient care. AI can be used to:
- Recognise patterns in diagnostic scans that doctors might miss, improve the accuracy and quality of diagnosis, and enhance clinical workloads
- Recommend treatments that might not have been considered by doctors and nurses
- Reduce the need for invasive procedures, like surgery
- Reduce exposure to treatment-related side effects.
AI will not replace doctors and nurses, but can be used to improve workflow, diagnosis and overall patient outcomes. AI will be able to optimise the management of workload, and enhance the efficiency of the work of doctors and nurses by automating mundane and repetitive tasks. This will free up time to allow doctors and nurses to focus more on their patients, reduce burnout and improve patient outcomes.
AI can be particularly useful in assessing large numbers of complex medical scans, and improving the accuracy and efficiency of a diagnosis. It can help with the classification, grading and staging of cancer, the development of treatment plans, and predicting a response to treatment.
AI can also be used to automatically generate clinical notes by bringing together and processing information provided by patients with scans and lab results. This streamlines documentation and makes sure no critical information is overlooked. Doctors and nurses can very quickly access the information they need for patients with long and complicated medical histories.
AI can be used to improve patient education and personalise information for individual patients.
The presentation concluded by suggesting that AI will become integral to the urologist’s practice in the next 5 years, and the sooner it is embraced by urologists, the better off their patients will be.
