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AAFP Launches Survey to Ensure That AI Advances Primary Care
Oct. 1, 2024, News Staff — Members can help shape artificial intelligence to benefit their practices and improve patient care through a survey that the AAFP is conducting in partnership with the health care innovation firm Rock Health.
The all-member survey asks whether and how primary care physicians nationwide use AI today, and what they need from AI tomorrow. It's open through Nov. 4.
AAFP EVP and CEO Shawn Martin unveiled the survey — titled “Use of Digital Health and AI in Primary Care” — during the first mainstage event at the 2024 Family Medicine Experience in Phoenix last week, where many in the audience quickly held up their phones when a QR link to the survey appeared on screens.
“I am excited to announce that the AAFP has initiated a significant project aimed at influencing the application and deployment of artificial intelligence within our field,” he said, speaking to about 3,000 attendees. “This partnership lets us explore and accelerate digital health and AI tools by identifying opportunities that can transform clinical practice, enhance the operations of primary care practices and improve outcomes.”
AAFP EVP and CEO Shawn Martin introduces a survey on the use of artificial intelligence at the 2024 Family Medicine Experience.
The survey results, Martin added, will help shape an in-person event that will bring family and other primary care physicians together with technology innovators next year as part of the AAFP’s collaboration with Rock Health. (The data will be reported in aggregate, with responses kept anonymous.)
AI is among the technologies the AAFP cites as useful to practices working toward administrative simplification. The Academy also has established principles to guide the ethical application of AI — chief among them that it must preserve and enhance primary care.
The survey anchors the “Advancing AI and Digital Health for Primary Care Initiative,” a collaborative effort to improve the delivery of high-quality primary care by
- exploring the technologies' impact in primary care;
- identifying where they could improve primary care clinical practice, operations and performance;
- informing innovators about the highest-need, highest-impact opportunities; and
- highlighting areas where the technologies could enhance medical education and training.
Rock Health describes itself as a firm that “accelerates innovation at the nexus of technology and health care through a digital health strategy group, a nonprofit advancing equity-centered change and an early-stage venture fund.”
The firm’s statement on the AAFP and Rock Health collaboration notes that “more than 280 venture-backed U.S. digital health startups with AI- or machine-learning-enabled solutions have raised $6.3 billion in funding.” Some two-thirds of this resourcing, Rock Health says, has been aimed so far at “solutions for provider organizations, including tools aimed at optimizing clinical decision-making, streamlining clinical and administrative operations and enabling more proactive care.”
Practicing family physicians and family medicine educators, including seven Academy members, are among the members of an expert leadership committee the AAFP and Rock Health are co-convening to steer this initiative. Its co-chairs are Brent Sugimoto, M.D., M.P.H., FAAFP, chief medical officer of Decoded Health and vice speaker of the California AFP; and Jen Peña, M.D., FACP, AAHIVS, a former White House physician and founder and CEO of MyCuratedHealth.
In 2019, speaking about the then-nascent Decoded Health as one of the clinicians testing an AI prototype, Sugimoto told AAFP News, "I want to take care of patients and have it (AI) be about the patient and not inbox management."