As AI transforms biotech , poised to impact oncology treatments, on the ground, the AI and cancer care transformation is helping doctors, clinicians, and health providers.

In this report, Debra Patt, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, executive vice president of policy and strategic initiatives at Texas Oncology and chair of the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s AI Task Force and the Community Oncology Alliance’s AI Task Force, explains how AI is helping doctors, what the challenges are, and how they can be navigated.

AI and Cancer Care: How Does AI Help Doctors?

Q: How is AI helping doctors?

Debra Patt, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, executive vice president at Texas Oncology: AI is helping doctors in three important ways:

Working top of license. AI allows clinicians to work top of license by decreasing administrative burden and facilitating improved patient engagement. One way this is happening is through digital AI scribes taking notes in the background, allowing doctors and patients to have eye contact and meaningful conversations. Another is by aggregating patient information at our fingertips, so we are not sorting through papers as we sit in front of patients.

At Texas Oncology, over 500 of our 600 doctors use these tools in clinical practice, and it has improved their interactions with patients and staff and diminished their administrative burden in a way that facilitates better work-life balance. I have called it the “home for dinner campaign” as usually the administrative burden not only creeps into the way that clinicians care for patients, but it also makes it difficult for clinicians to have dinner and be home in the evenings with their families.

Clinical decision support.

We are privileged to live in a time of tremendous innovation in cancer care and it makes the care journey more complex for doctors and patients. Using clinical decision support, or nudges, that don’t direct or force clinical decisions, but create a choice architecture for physicians to preference optimal evidence-based decisions is helpful.

We studied this throughout US Oncology across nine statewide practices and about 30,000 patients to understand how clinical decision support would influence provider decisions and found it was incredibly helpful at improving concordance with evidence-based decisions without forcing any clinical choice, which should always remain between a doctor and a patient. These tools that put knowledge at our fingertips help us navigate the landscape of clinical decision-making more easily.

As we look to the future of cancer care and we observe more innovative therapies, changes in the age distribution of the population leading to higher rates of cancer, and more cancer survivors, we should anticipate the staffing crisis we are in today being exacerbated...unless.

Unless we can optimize tool use to improve the meaningful function of our teams. By allowing our teams to work smarter, we will meet the needs of the oncology ecosystem for tomorrow. At Texas Oncology, we are already using some of these tools to reduce the administrative burden on nursing, and it has been very successful.

AI and Cancer Care: The Challenges on the Ground

Q: What challenges do you see on your end and how can they be navigated?

Debra Patt, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, executive vice president at Texas Oncology: I talk about this journey a lot as “The Road to Nirvana,” as we are on a journey to a perfect practice that is easy for staff and patients to navigate, but there are many stops, speed bumps, and roadblocks on the way, and the destination changes as we move along the road. Some challenges include alignment and prioritization around how we want the journey to manifest, capital allocation, technical integration and change management.

We also have to navigate compliance, security and privacy issues that have become increasingly complex as we work with many partners. But the vision is clear and compelling enough to garner a lot of time and resources towards these efforts for all healthcare organizations.

AI and Cancer Care: Final Thoughts

Q: Anything else you would like to add?

Debra Patt, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, executive vice president at Texas Oncology: I think for organizational leaders, we need to paint the picture of the possible, create the right teams of clinical, operational, technical and security leadership to craft the road to nirvana for their organization, and consider how they engage and manage change.

How I approach this has evolved over time. Five years ago, we were looking at many vendor solutions and how they would optimally integrate. As capabilities are changing rapidly and access to data resources must be limited, we now appreciate that working with a limited group of stakeholders to co-develop how you navigate the journey you are on seems to be the fastest and safest way to get to where we want to go.