Does AI Have a Place in Behavioral Healthcare? Experts Weigh In

2023-04-18

The Covid-19 pandemic showed that technology like video and text-based therapy can greatly support behavioral healthcare. But where does Artificial Intelligence (AI) come into play? There is great potential to use AI in a behavioral health setting, said Taft Parsons III, vice president and chief psychiatric officer of CVS Health. However, AI still has a ways to go. “I’ve been playing with some of the AI chat programs and being an expert in a particular area, they are currently wildly inaccurate. … What we’re going to have to figure out is, how do we make the AI smart enough to be able to better discern the good from the bad?” Parsons said Tuesday during a session at the HIMSS 2023 conference in Chicago. Parsons added that while the technology industry tends to move fast when developing solutions, the healthcare industry is different. “In tech and in the startup world, there’s a tendency to move quickly, to break things and keep going. But in healthcare, we’re talking about potentially people who may be broken,” he said. “We have an additional responsibility to make sure that we’re not breaking things and moving quickly as this technology becomes available.” He pointed to past mistakes with telebehavioral health, in which some patients received prescriptions that they shouldn’t have. One company that came under fire for this is Cerebral, which faced scrutiny for their prescribing practices of Adderall. “With telebehavioral health … growing very quickly, you saw prescriptions getting written that shouldn’t have been written,” Parsons said. “I think AI is the same thing. There’s a lot of potential, I think it’s going to be fantastic. We just have to be very responsible in how we deploy it.” Marti Taylor, CEO of alcohol and drug rehab center OneFifteen, also spoke on the panel and echoed Parsons’ comments. “I think there’s absolutely a place for it. … Ten years from now, I think we’ll see that it really is useful technology,” Taylor said. “However, I think there [needs to be more] robust testing, measuring, looking at the outcomes to make sure that we’re really doing the right thing for patients.” Seán Stickle, also a panelist and the COO of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, pointed out that there are already situations where AI has proven useful. He mentioned a woman who called the organization’s helpline about six months ago and shared that she found the helpline because she told Siri, a virtual assistant on Apple products, that she was feeling depressed. Siri then directed her to NAMI. Another panelist added that this type of technology will be especially helpful in behavioral health when it’s layered in with models that have been proven to work. This includes collaborative care, in which a team of professionals like primary care physicians and psychiatrists are working together to care for the patient. “How do we take a collaborative model, a good clinical model that we know works well, and infuse it with the technology that helps us do more of that?” said Zenobia Brown, senior vice president and associate chief medical officer at Northwell Health.

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