Can Artificial Intelligence Make Healthcare Human Again?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is carving out its own space in the healthcare industry, raising an important question: Can AI actually make healthcare more human and compassionate? At first glance, it might seem strange. How could a machine — a bundle of codes and circuits — bring more support into healthcare? Nevertheless, AI holds promise for improving patient care, including in supporting healthcare professionals and even addressing burnout, all while allowing human empathy to shine through.

But how, exactly? Well, here are just a few ways.

Patient-Centered Care Matters More Than Ever

To start, let’s talk about why patient-centered care has become so important in the healthcare world. Patient-centered care is not just a buzzword for healthcare organizations to seem more caring about their patients. Rather, it’s a philosophy focused on empathy, compassion, and trust. Studies show that patients who feel understood and valued experience better health outcomes, greater satisfaction with their care, and, importantly, stronger emotional resilience when facing health challenges.

Unfortunately, as demands for efficiency grow, time for meaningful patient interactions tends to shrink. Healthcare professionals may want to connect on a deeper level, but they often feel stretched too thin to deliver the compassion that they truly wish to provide.

Barriers to Compassionate Care

In high-stress healthcare environments, time is tight, stress is high, and providers often carry heavy administrative loads. Unsurprisingly, burnout is common, with recent studies reporting that around 63% of physicians and 56% of nurses feel exhausted and overworked. When providers are burnt out, compassionate, personal care often takes a backseat (or sometimes even gets left on the side of the road).

How AI Can Support Compassionate Care

AI cannot replicate human empathy. What it can do, however, is make space for it by handling things like repetitive tasks and personalized treatment insights, and offering around-the-clock support — all of which give healthcare professionals more time and energy to focus on meaningful patient interactions.

Here are some more detailed ways that AI could help bring a more human touch to healthcare.

1. Reducing Administrative Burdens and Provider Burnout

Administrative work, like appointment setting, billing, record-keeping, can consume up to 70% of a provider’s time. With AI taking over these duties, providers could spend less time on paperwork and more time connecting with patients. Studies show that reducing these burdens can significantly reduce burnout, making it easier for providers to maintain the mental capacity to engage in meaningful and compassionate interactions with patients.

2. Personalizing Care and Optimizing Treatment Plans

AI’s data-crunching powers enable it to personalize treatment plans based on a patient’s medical history, genetic information, and even their previous treatment responses. It can help with identifying which medications or treatments may be most effective for an individual. This targeted approach not only improves clinical outcomes by enhancing treatment precision but also provides patients with a greater sense of control, reducing the stress and emotional toll of trial-and-error treatments.

3. Adding a Dose of Empathy to Patient-Provider Communication

Although AI doesn’t experience emotions, AI-powered tools, like chatbots, can offer empathetic-like responses, at all hours of the day. Many patients appreciate the chance to ask questions or get medication reminders without waiting for office hours. In fact, some studies even show that, in certain cases, patients perceive these AI-driven interactions as more empathetic than conversations with rushed human providers.

4. Providing Support for Emotional Well-Being

AI-driven mental health apps, along with digital therapeutic tools, are essential resources for managing the emotional aspects of healthcare, especially for patients undergoing high-stress treatments. Apps that provide mindfulness exercises or those that offer cognitive behavioral therapy interventions can give patients the support they need to cope with negative feelings like anxiety or depression between visits to their providers. AI can even monitor well-being through self-reported data from wearable devices, alerting providers if a patient shows signs of distress, allowing them to reach out at just the right time.

5. Empowering Patients with Knowledge and Agency

Education is key to patient empowerment. AI can help shift care from a hospital-centered to a patient-centered model by providing accessible educational materials, helping patients understand their conditions and treatment options. AI can help patients explore different scenarios, such as the risks and benefits of various procedures, making difficult decisions more manageable. This empowers patients to make informed choices about their care and become active participants in that care.

Artificial Intelligence Essential Reads

Are Chatbots Too Certain and Too Nice?

Beware the Obsequious AI Assistant

Balancing AI and Human Interaction in Healthcare

As AI continues to advance, healthcare must balance the use of technology with the need for human connection. While AI can assist in delivering compassionate care, human oversight is needed to help make sure that these tools are used ethically and equitably. Transparency, collaboration between innovators and practitioners, and a commitment to patient-centered principles are critical to integrating AI in a way that enhances the patient experience.

AI can help take on the paperwork, crunch the data, and deliver support around the clock. But at the end of the day, it’s the human touch—listening, caring, understanding—that makes healthcare truly healing. In the future, we don’t have to choose between AI and human compassion; we can have both, working together to create a healthcare experience that’s efficient, personalized, and truly human-centered.