At EBO, we’re privileged to tackle two clear problems that need solving in the healthcare industry: access and demand. Limited access to healthcare within reasonable time and years of bureaucracy have imposed impersonal processes onto patients, leading to disengagement from their own care-plan, and poorer medical outcomes. Patients witness a healthcare system which lacks resiliency and manifests resource burn-out.
Restoring Conversations at Scale: Overcoming the Digital Literacy Barrier
One of the main issues we aim to tackle is access. Those most in need of health services are often excluded due to a digital literacy barrier. While healthcare providers have raced to digitise their processes, research from EuroStat shows that only 56% of European citizens have basic digital skills necessary for the interaction with such systems. We believe that the solution to this is the most basic component of interaction: conversations. By restoring conversations at scale through Artificial Intelligence, we can imbue them with empathy and make them accessible to any language and on any device.
Building Workforce Capacity with AI-Powered Automation
The second issue we aim to tackle is demand. Hospitals don’t have the capacity to meet rising workload requirements. A WHO report states that healthcare systems need major change to be sustainable and projects a shortfall of 9.9m healthcare professionals by the end of this decade. This figure has increased following the pandemic. EBO’s solution builds workforce capacity through automating patient-pathways. This not only helps to meet the demand but also helps to restore patient agency, leading to better clinical outcomes.
Gaining Patient Trust in AI-Powered Healthcare Solutions
One of the biggest blockers to the adoption of healthtech solutions by patients is the lack of trust in Artificial Intelligence. Patients may have heard of failed attempts by various AI-powered systems that promised to revolutionise treatment, but failed to live up to its claims. In order to ensure patients’ trust in AI innovation, it is important to be transparent about the benefits of the technology and how it works. We need to help patients understand the benefits of AI and be clear about how the technology can support their care.
Fostering AI Literacy for a Better Understanding of the Technology
To gain patient trust, it is important to foster AI literacy among both patients and healthcare providers. This means taking the time to explain key AI concepts, such as classification and confidence levels, ethics and fairness in machine learning, for non-technical audiences. By doing this, we can shift the discussion away from AI marketing-speak and towards a better understanding of the technology. AI requires a deep partnership between technologists and humanists, and it presents the need for interdisciplinary education, something we are failing to achieve in our public policy on education.
Building Trustworthy AI: Lawful, Ethical, Robust, and Explainable
Lastly, to ensure patient trust in AI-powered healthcare solutions, it is crucial that the technology is trustworthy. This means that it must be lawful (respecting all applicable laws and regulations), ethical (respecting ethical principles and values), robust (both from a technical perspective while taking into account its social environment), and explainable. By building trustworthy AI, we can ensure that patients and healthcare providers can trust the technology and its capabilities.
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