Patient Input Can Improve AI Models in Health Care: Considerations

The first article in this series interviewed companies that give patients a voice somehow in the development of AI models affecting health care. I talked to several other companies that try in various ways to improve the typical use of patient input developing AI.“Don” Dongyang Zhang, MD/PhD, AI Lead for Elekta, describes the common technique called instruction tuning that refines existing AI models: “Human feedback, including from patients, is crucial in refining these responses: we can create, the old-fashioned way, what an ideal response should look like and then feed a set of such responses to the AI to allow it to learn by example and generate responses closer to the desired output.”Avanade, now part of Microsoft, is an AI-based collaboration platform. In healthcare, it can help teams find solutions to patient problems; I recently remarked on their use for assessing social determinants of health.