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José E. Rodríguez and Yves Lussier’s article The AI Moonshot: What We Need and What We Do Not presents an informed perspective on the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) within family medicine, while also highlighting the pitfalls of overcomplicating or misdirecting AI development. In responding to their work, I draw upon a broader framework that integrates humanistic psychology, systems thinking, and decolonial ethics. These frameworks allow for a more nuanced understanding of how AI can be deployed meaningfully in healthcare—ensuring that it fosters relationships, respects cultural contexts, and addresses systemic inequities rather than reinforcing them.
1. AI as a Tool for Reducing Administrative Burden and Enhancing Efficiency
AI has significant potential to streamline the administrative aspects of healthcare, particularly through the optimization of electronic health records (EHRs) and related systems. As the authors highlight, current EHR systems are fragmented and redundant, imposing cognitive and procedural burdens on physicians. This inefficiency distracts healthcare providers from their core role: engaging meaningfully with patients.
Reducing Redundancy: AI can reduce the time physicians spend navigating these fragmented records by organizing and consolidating data. AI could automate tasks such as note-taking, reducing the time spent on documentation and enabling physicians to engage more fully with their patients.
Facilitating Collaborative Care: AI can bridge gaps between healthcare teams by organizing information across different specialties and reducing confusion. This functionality ensures that all members of the care team can access coherent, up-to-date information that aligns with the patient’s overall treatment plan.
These applications directly address the administrative overload that currently burdens family physicians and could restore some balance to their workload, allowing them to focus on the patient-provider relationship.
2. AI and Patient-Centered Communication
A central tenet of family medicine is the relational aspect of care, where physicians build trust with patients and work collaboratively to navigate complex health challenges. AI must not only support physicians in their clinical duties but also serve to enhance communication between physician and patient.
Bridging the Technocratic Gap: AI can serve as an intermediary to translate complex medical information into digestible formats, facilitating understanding and improving patient compliance. For instance, AI could provide explanations of medical conditions, treatment options, and lifestyle changes in ways that are culturally sensitive and easily understood by patients, even if they face language barriers or lack health literacy.
Supporting Marginalized Communities: AI, when designed with cultural humility, can be used to address health disparities by creating tools that are specifically tailored to the needs of marginalized communities. This may include providing materials in patients’ preferred languages, offering accessible self-management resources, and ensuring that healthcare access is not limited by socioeconomic factors.
These AI applications can help close the gap between physician expertise and patient understanding, ensuring that patients are not only informed but also empowered to make decisions that align with their values and needs.
3. AI as a Facilitator of Relational Care
While AI has the potential to optimize workflow and communication, it must not overshadow the relational nature of healthcare. Family physicians do much more than diagnose and treat—they build lasting relationships, provide emotional support, and help patients navigate the often bewildering health system.
Enhancing Physician-Patient Interaction: By automating routine administrative tasks, AI can free up physicians’ cognitive resources, enabling them to focus on what matters most: fostering trust and providing compassionate care. In particular, AI could act as a scribe during patient interactions, allowing physicians to be present with their patients rather than distracted by note-taking.
Maintaining Empathy in the Face of Technology: It is critical that AI tools are designed in a way that complements—not diminishes—the empathic and relational dimensions of care. The integration of AI into clinical practice should focus on enhancing the physician’s ability to attend to the emotional and social needs of their patients, rather than reducing them to a series of data points.
This approach ensures that AI supports rather than diminishes the human aspects of healthcare, aligning with the broader goal of delivering care that is both technically sound and deeply human.
4. AI as a Solution to Structural and Systemic Healthcare Inequities
At its best, AI can be a powerful force for promoting health equity, particularly for historically underserved and marginalized populations. Family medicine, with its emphasis on community health and preventative care, is particularly well-positioned to benefit from AI’s capacity to reduce barriers to care.
Addressing Healthcare Access: AI could streamline processes like prior authorization, ensuring that patients receive the care they need without unnecessary delays or bureaucratic obstacles. Additionally, AI could assist in identifying gaps in care for patients with chronic conditions, ensuring that no one falls through the cracks.
Cultural Sensitivity and Inclusion: AI must be designed with an awareness of the sociocultural contexts in which healthcare is delivered. This means developing tools that recognize and account for the diverse backgrounds of patients, including their socioeconomic status, language, and cultural practices. AI could thus help physicians better understand the full complexity of a patient’s life, including familial and socio-ethical factors that may influence treatment decisions.
In this way, AI has the potential to challenge and dismantle existing inequities within healthcare, making it more accessible, inclusive, and just.
5. Ethical Considerations and the Importance of Cultural Humility
As AI technologies become more integrated into healthcare, it is imperative that they are developed with ethical and cultural sensitivity. AI should not merely be a tool for efficiency—it must also respect and uphold the dignity and autonomy of patients.
Avoiding Bias and Discrimination: AI tools must be carefully designed to avoid perpetuating systemic biases, which are already prevalent in healthcare. This includes ensuring that AI does not reinforce health disparities or marginalize vulnerable groups, but instead promotes equity and fairness.
Ethical Deployment of AI: The integration of AI into healthcare systems must be guided by ethical principles that prioritize patient autonomy, informed consent, and privacy. The use of AI should align with decolonial ethics, resisting the trend toward the commodification of healthcare and preserving the human elements that make care meaningful.
AI, when ethically developed and deployed, can act as a tool for promoting not just efficiency but also justice in healthcare.