What role will technology have in replacing human roles and interactions?

This is a question often asked in response to the growth in artificial intelligence, considering the extent to which machines will ever become ‘human’. In answering this we must consider what it means to be human. A good starting point is to consider our needs as humans.

According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, humans have a ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, which starts with building a foundation of safety and security, followed by a need for human relationships, connection and understanding and finally a need for personal growth, to share, understand and learn. Possibly our greatest need is to experience kindness and compassion in response to our vulnerability. Therefore, to be ‘human’, technology design, particularly in healthcare, must consider how it might be able to meet one or more of our core human needs.

Too often, our experience of healthcare falls short of expectations. We experience rushed, clinical, and emotionally detached care that considers a patient as a number of fragmented parts instead of their holistic well-being. More likely a result of wider cost-pressured system failures than any individual. While clinicians have many policies and guidelines for effective disease management and ensuring safety, they may have little guidance for providing compassionate care.

Dr Abraham Verghese, Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, believes technology is detrimentally impacting this clinical relationship. In his essay entitled ‘The Importance of Being’, he describes how the use of medical technology has led to a disconnection in doctor-patient communication. With increased use of electronic health records, doctors place greater emphasis on connecting with what he refers to as the ‘iPatient’, the technical screen-based representation of the patient, than connecting with the patient as a human being. Connecting to a screen can feel safer and simpler for some doctors.

There is much evidence that compassionate care not only improves the experience of care, it also improves clinical outcomes. In one study, patients receiving an empathetic and supportive preoperative consultation were shown to have significantly improved wound healing and surgical outcomes, their need for opiates halved and their length of stay in hospital reduced.

With advances in machine learning and cognition, we can design technology that imparts compassion, empathy and humanity into the experience of care. It can be used as a tool to instil an emotion-driven approach to aid communication and understanding, which deepens patients’ grasp of abstract medical concepts necessary to understand their condition.

To be intelligent, technology must incorporate seamlessly into the lives of its users to maximise use and value, this is particularly important when we consider patients as users. When designed around their needs, appreciating the daily impact of disease on their lives and its psychological burden, we can harness advances in technology to encourage, motivate and foster feelings of comfort and confidence in patients. While technology might in itself be a poor substitute for real human connection and empathy, if used properly, it can be a powerful tool to foster partnership, drive a unity of purpose and improve communication, delivering a better patient experience and improved clinical outcomes.

As the growth in technology use in healthcare continues to accelerate unabated, we need to move forward with a better understanding of the populations that may struggle to engage with technology, the barriers they face and the support they may require. Technology design must also consider the wider delivery of healthcare, helping not hindering care providers in their role, seamlessly integrating into optimal care processes, existing datasets and wherever possible, used as an enabler for the delivery of new more effective ways of providing digitally-enabled equitable care.