AI at the end of life: how AI can help physicians treat the terminally ill with greater compassion. From the article:

…All too often patients die in an intensive care unit with unfinished business and missed goodbyes.

[Dr. Stephanie] Harman is a co-leader of a Stanford pilot program that aims to change that. Each morning she receives a priority report from an intelligent computer program that, every 24 hours, analyzes which patients under the care of the general medicine physicians would benefit from palliative care. The tool helps her spend more time with patients and less on record reviews and, most importantly, it leads to better endings.

This is one of many Stanford Medicine projects that combine artificial intelligence technologies with medical expertise to help doctors make faster, more informed and humane decisions. They hope it will help them spend less time in front of computer screens and more time doing what they love: caring for patients.

Harman was first introduced to the concept of AI in palliative care when Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, an associate professor of biomedical informatics, attended a hospital quality meeting in early 2017.

“I’ve developed a computer algorithm that predicts the likelihood of patients dying within 12 months,” declared Shah…. “Would you find that useful?”…

Shah began developing a mortality prediction tool to help palliative care professionals identify patients who might benefit from having end-of-life conversations well before a medical crisis strikes….

Harman now uses the second generation of Shah’s palliative prediction tool. Each morning, it emails her a list of newly admitted hospital patients who have a 90 percent or higher probability of dying in three to 12 months. There are no names on the email or details about why they’re on the list. It’s up to Harman to review the medical records she receives and decide if those patients have palliative care needs. She’s found the list to be helpful, and she sees how it can improve hospital care and enable her to spend more time with the most critical patients.

“Human physicians are way better at predicting death within a few days, but I’d bet on my model over a physician any day in predicting death three to 12 months out,” Shah said.