Health & Medicine
Actual Intelligence
People are seeking medical advice from AI. A better idea? A clinician with a deeper Rolodex.
Kai Kennedy, D.P.T. (D.P.T.’05), really just wants health providers to talk to one another. It’s not asking much.
“You’ve got to remember that our bodies, we’re one big stack of bones, and a problem in one joint might be reflective of a problem somewhere else in the chain,” says the VCU associate professor of physical therapy.
“Like, when would a dentist ever need to call a PT? Maybe that doesn’t seem like a natural connection. But [say] I’m a dentist, and I have a patient with jaw pain. That’s a joint, the temporomandibular joint. And if I know that physical therapists treat joints and movements in all areas of the body and not just ankle sprains, then I might call a PT colleague and say, ‘Hey, I need your help with my patient.’ Part of my role is trying to bring our learners from different schools on the MCV Campus together to better understand when they would make that call.”
Kennedy is on faculty at the VCU College of Health Professions and is one of six assistant directors of interprofessional education across the university’s health sciences schools. Interprofessional education is medical shorthand for pulling together health providers so they can learn from one another and better treat patients. It’s the mesh network of medical knowledge undergirding good healthcare.
Lately, though, patients are seeking answers from a different source.
In late March, the health research nonprofit KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) reported in its recurring Health Information and Trust Tracking Poll that about 32% of U.S. adults are turning to artificial intelligence for health information and advice. Among the top reasons: 65% said a desire for immediate advice; 19% said they could not afford the cost of seeing a provider; and 18% said they don’t have a provider or could not get an appointment.
AI is cheap and readily available. It also can’t physically examine a patient. The internet has long been “a common place for folks to try to learn about what they’re going through,” Kennedy says. “But the problem is you don’t necessarily know when it’s right and when it’s wrong.”
The interprofessional network, though, is also imperfect — a consequence of America’s patched quilt of stand-alone clinics, hospital systems, insurance plans and profession-specific licenses and college programs. If you’ve ever had a problem that’s flummoxed a physician and they can’t point you in the right direction, you’ve lived this.
“Interprofessional collaboration requires your provider not only to understand their own skill set and scope of practice but that of their colleagues as well,” Kennedy says. “But not every dentist is going to be looking at your middle back to see if there’s a postural issue contributing to your jaw pain.”
“You’ve got to remember that our bodies, we’re one big stack of bones, and a problem in one joint might be reflective of a problem somewhere else in the chain.”
Kennedy’s trying to make this better, one class at a time. Her field and VCU offer a glimpse of what that looks like in the wild. Think of it as interprofessional collaboration made structural.
Hayden Smith, D.P.T. (D.P.T.’19), is a neurologic physical therapist at VCU’s Short Pump Pavilion in Henrico County. He’s part of a team at VCU Health’s Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Center that works with patients who have conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, brain and spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis and ALS.
Most of the patients Smith sees are referred from a colleague within the center, which houses neurologists, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, social workers, genetic counselors, PTs and occupational and speech-language therapists.
“A big part of why I wanted to do neurologic PT is disease education — helping patients understand how exercise helps them manage their disease or chronic condition,” Smith says. “VCU’s movement disorders doctors are phenomenal with disease education. But I sometimes get patients that are referred from an outside neurologist [who says], ‘Oh, you have Parkinson’s disease. Here’s a pill. Take one of these three times a day. See you later.’ And it’s really unfortunate because [the patients] know nothing about Parkinson’s disease other than what they can find online. And Dr. Google is a really bad doctor.”
Smith says patients referred in-house typically arrive with a much better understanding of their conditions and needs. A 2010 study in the international journal Medical Teacher — it’s old but the results are still solid, Kennedy says — found that orthopedic patients treated by teams of physicians, nurses, PTs and OTs reported that they received better care and thought they were better informed by their providers.
“The benefit of having these interprofessional relationships [is] that we can draw on each other’s strengths,” Kennedy says. “It’s trying to instill in providers an understanding that their counterparts in other areas could benefit their practice and the care of their community.”
