AI Can Help Community and Academic Oncology Practices: Tina Bhatnagar, DO

One of the hottest topics in the oncology space continues to be the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) into care and treatment decision-making. There are advantages and pitfalls to its use, with most explaining it is meant to enhance decision-making and not replace clinical expertise.

In this interview, Bhavana (Tina) Bhatnagar, DO, hematologist, medical oncologist, and associate professor of medicine at West Virginia University Cancer Institute at Wheeling Hospital, underscores the importance of partnering with sources of AI. She explains that with AI’s ability to synthesize information, it can be of great assistance to both academic and community practices. Bhatnagar was a panelist for the discussion, “The Impact of Precision Medicine in Value-Based Care,” at the November 13 Institute for Value-Based Medicine® event held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Rewatch part 1 of this interview for insight on how even with great progress in precision medicine, equitable access remains elusive.

Transcript

How do you use AI currently, and what are potential future applications?

For me right now, AI is a very hot topic, and it is coming into all aspects of our lives, and so we do have to know how to work with it and make sure that we are partnering with AI so that everybody kind of wins and so that we're providing efficient care for all of our patients. Currently, I use AI in only a couple of different contexts. I use it for my workflow to assist with clinical documentation, and I also use it sometimes for various decision-making tools. If there is a particular clinical scenario where I need to get a quick answer about what the right next step might be, I have found various AI platforms to be helpful in terms of assisting me with my decision-making, but not necessarily making the decision for me

I think in the precision oncology space, too, I do believe that AI will work its way into that space as well, with the goal of ultimately synthesizing all of this information that we have about our patients, their clinical data, their tumor data, their genomic testing, and any sort of multiomic testing into 1 treatment plan that you can follow to take care of patients. I think that will be helpful; particularly, I think it will be helpful in the academic medical centers, but I think it may be even more helpful in community practices, where physicians are responsible for knowing about all kinds of different cancers, and I think it will allow them to stay up-to-date.