AI And Cancer Care: How AI Helps Oncology Healthcare Providers

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.

Stabilizing staffing.

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.