The integration of A.I. in this area may play an important role in rebalancing the clinician’s workload, allowing more time for interaction with patients, which will improve the quality of care. Notably, practitioners need to invest a lot of time in reading the notes taken from previous visits to get a clear picture of the patient and their history.
In this respect, A.I. could come in as a tool capable of analyzing human language for important information and could serve to summarize the important data from a given patient’s electronic health records.
For psychiatrists and psychologists, this information could be presented succinctly at the beginning of each appointment, for example, by giving an overview of the various mental status tests that have been performed throughout the patient’s life, and the treatment that has been proposed.
In addition to this, artificial intelligence when coupled with speech or video analysis could provide a summary of the patient’s mental state, which could be used as a complement to the mental state evaluation performed by the professional.
One of the advantages is that this algorithm would be objective and we would not run the risk of variability between the different views of clinicians, but the authors propose its use as a complement to the evaluation made by a professional and not a substitute.
Still following this logic of thought, programs that use A.I. could also be adapted to record the information collected during a psychology consultation or a psychological evaluation and automatically summarize the session, thus eliminating the need for professionals to make clinical notes at the end of the consultation/session.
All these tools will certainly allow a deeper understanding of the patients, making it easier for professionals to be more available, helping the psychologist to be more dedicated to helping the patient find the right tools for his or her needs, and perhaps helping to shorten the duration of therapy.
Similarly, some preliminary explorations are also being made for the implementation of therapy chatbots, which could simulate interaction with individuals in varying degrees of reality and are likely to become a mainstay of online mental health services, assisting in finding, for example, websites or apps where people can get help.
