AI in Action – Enhancing Public Health Strategies with Human-Centered Technology
The hype of AI and its potential application to public health is no longer hype – and the application has become reality. Public health departments of all sizes across the country now have tangible, real-world opportunities to integrate AI into existing processes, empowering them to add capacity and maximize limited resources while focusing more of the work that makes an impact.
Realizing the Strengths of AI
AI is a powerful data and summarization tool. An AI-powered data assistant eliminates the need for manual searches by providing instant, tailored responses to questions based on a curated, verified data library. More than just numbers to know, an AI chatbot can display insights via charts, tables, graphs and more, and provide captions. With answers at the speed of need, public health professionals benefit from AI’s real-time responses to guide their decision-making so they can use their expertise and time saved to fuel deeper data exploration where necessary.
AI can analyze qualitative data like transcripts from focus groups and interviews that are core to conducting a complete community health assessment. Without AI, public health professionals must review every document over and over to find key themes and reflect the lived experience of the community. Now, AI can summarize documents and pull relevant information out verbatim to provide qualitative insights in about 30 seconds for the transcripts and other sources. These summaries are organized so it is much easier to assess what might be missing, see patterns and compare community sentiment to your secondary data.
AI can draft documents and dramatically reduce the time it takes to write a community health assessment or community health improvement plan. This capability is deployed across the process from writing captions for the hundreds of charts and graphs in a community health assessment to summarizing what was said in a focus group. This automation removes the burden of writing all those captions so public health professionals can focus on reviewing the draft analysis, refining any text and selecting the visualizations that tell the most clear and compelling story that also complies with all regulations. AI support in creating this content saves teams 87% of the time and energy needed to complete the initial draft so a human can focus on being the final editor.
Understanding Where AI Isn’t the Answer
While we’re incredibly confident on these transformative use cases for AI in public health, we’re also certain that AI is not a magic, silver bullet. We’re not suggesting that from now on you don’t need a data scientist or epidemiologist. We’re not trying to throw AI at 100 percent of this important work. That doesn’t make sense. We’re integrating AI where appropriate to automate work so public health leaders can focus on work that requires their expertise in developing solutions, handling emerging threats, forming partnerships, and engaging the community to achieve the ultimate end goal of healthier, more resilient communities.
What the Future Looks Like
We are excited to be maximizing the potential of AI in public health – and even more importantly, we’re sure that the AI of today is just the beginning. This technology is evolving very quickly. At Metopio, we are walking side-by-side with our healthcare partners to understand where their needs are so we can constantly iterate and bring them better tools to do their work. There is much more to come, and we feel that years of expertise and community voice must be reflected in how we move forward to help make a difference in communities across the country.
Learn how Metopio is pioneering these advancements to help public health departments work more efficiently and effectively.