Intelligent Provision of Tailored, Easily Understood, and Trusted Health Information for Patient Empowerment

Abstract

Although digital transformation in healthcare is accelerating, there is still a disconnect between current healthcare, focused on disease management, and a more holistic approach that looks at the health and wellbeing of the whole person. The latter approach aims at empowering patients and other health information seekers by improving their comprehension of their health so that they can manage it better. Currently, few stand-alone applications for patient empowerment exist and they seldom help users to understand health information. Thus, health information seekers often interact with the Web through generic search engines, which often produce results that are overwhelming, too generic, and of poor quality. This paper shows how the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a responsible way may provide patients and others with health higher quality information that empowers them to improve their health and wellbeing. It presents an AI engine that extracts health content from the Web and provides the user with health information that is relevant, trustworthy, and easy to understand. The AI engine has been used to create an Intelligent Empowering Agent (IEA) that dialogues with users in simple language to provide customised information on symptoms and diseases, which helps them form their own evidence-based opinion on health matters that concern them.