Health IT, Patient Engagement

Search engine launches AI-powered bot for patient-physician interaction

Everybody and their brother would seem to have a digital health app tied to some form of artificial intelligence algorithm. But for a search engine business, it makes sense.

Baidu Melody 1

Baidu, a China-based search engine business, took the wraps off a digital health tool to field medical queries and conversations between physicians and their patients called Melody medical assistant. The company claimed in a news release that the app uses deep learning to help doctors gather information from patients about their medical conditions and help physicians arrive at a diagnosis.

To give an idea how the bot is designed to work, a spokeswoman provided an overview, in response to emailed questions. When a patient opens the app to pose a question, Melody asks the patient relevant follow-up questions to clarify information such as the duration, severity, and frequency of symptoms. The questions can also touch on additional symptoms related to the condition, even though the patient may not have mentioned them.

The point is to give the doctor a more detailed sense of the patient’s condition to decide whether to recommend the patient for an appointment sooner rather than  later. The Melody app can also suggest treatment options to the doctor, who can either pass on those options to the patient or develop their own set of recommendations. The app is designed more as a clinical support tool than as a final diagnosis, the spokeswoman said.

The bot is intended to be integrated with Baidu Doctor, an app that Baidu launched in China last year, according to the news release. The Baidu Doctor app allows patients to ask doctors direct questions, book appointments online and search for healthcare-related information.

“Our goal is to provide patients with an online experience that’s close to a human conversation,” said Wei Fan, senior director in Baidu’s Big Data Lab. “We believe this natural type of interaction will help patients feel more comfortable with their doctors and result in more beneficial patient-doctor relationships.”

The reliance of Baidu’s app on deep learning is fitting for a search engine business. The Verge cited Neil Lawrence, a professor of machine learning at the University of Sheffield and part of Amazon’s AI team, in an article this week. He noted that despite the widespread interest in startups using machine learning algorithms to process data, they lack the ability to access enough data to make their algorithms smarter. But a search engine or enormous online business like Amazon, Google or Facebook, does have access to a seemingly limitless supply of data.

Although attracting new users to try out Melody and getting experienced users to return is one measure of success for Baidu, its usefulness as a clinical research tool will matter more.

Baidu’s digital health development reflects the broader, accelerating trend across China to adopt digital health tools as one way to improve access to healthcare, particularly by private health insurers in China. As with the adoption of digital health in this country, the process is not without some sobering reminders that balancing the roll out of technology in healthcare with patchy regulatory oversight comes with its own set of challenges. For example, Baidu was forced to change its practice of allowing unlicensed hospitals to promote themselves on its search engine when a cancer patient who followed up with one of the ads died from the experimental treatment he received.

 

Photo: Bigstock

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