The Future of Family Medicine - AI, Interoperability, and more !

Hi Carl,

Thanks for your message. You have hit upon one of the critical issues for certain AI applications in primary care, but more broadly in health care. We are living in an age of data informed medicine, but as you noted, if our foundation or bedrock of high quality data is not yet there, how can AI-driven tools be applied most meaningfully ? Can AI tools in primary care simultaneously reduce physicians’ admin burden and improve data quality ? All to be determined, with many innovative minds exploring this rapidly changing field.

With our partners CIHI and Health Canada, Infoway’s efforts on standards-driven interoperability and data portability should help to solidify our data foundation over time. Stay tuned…

Very well written papers, thanks for passing them on!

The parts of the AI Working Group paper that speak to data access and integrity hit home with me. "Participant's were, however, optimistic that with improved funding, a focus on FM values and functions, teamwork, and data, AI will improve FM practice and care delivery" and action item number 3 that states "support existing initiatives related to developing high-quality primary care data sets suitable for AI", for example.

This deserve further emphasis.

It is lovely to see excitement and awareness of AI and related technologies amongst physicians and amongst the general public. However, what is missing from the current conversation is that fact that you can't train, validate, deploy, or maintain a ML or AI model unless you have an absolute solid bedrock of existing data underneath them. And unfortunately, we do not have a bedrock. Developing high quality data - be it primary or otherwise - is a necessary first step to being able to utilize these technologies and should be a strategic priority.

I want to highlight a very interesting March 2024 issue of the Canadian Family Physician journal, which includes a number of articles on digital health in Primary Care.

First, Dr. Alex Singer and Dr. Alan Katz have written a great piece entitled "Future of family medicine in Canada: Four evidence-based strategies for health care transformation." www.cfp.ca/content/70/3/155

There's a lot of alignment here, with Infoway's work with the Provinces and Territories, Health Canada, and CIHI on advancing Connected Care / Interoperability, particularly the section "Promote real-time information exchange".

Second, the research article "Artificial intelligence for family medicine research in Canada: current state and future directions: Report of the CFPC AI Working Group", that attempts to summarize the current landscape of AI in primary care research in Canada. I was fortunate to be part of an expert round table session mentioned in this report, which identifies action areas for research in primary care AI. www.cfp.ca/content/70/3/161

The recommendations are strong, but will likely need some modification in the new era of generative AI tools.

Interested in the community's thoughts on this - regarding AI in primary care, do you see hope, or hype ? Where should research efforts be focused ?