Abstract
Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way mental health care is delivered. By gathering diagnostic information, facilitating treatment, and reviewing clinician behavior, conversational AI is poised to impact traditional approaches to delivering psychotherapy. While this transition is not disconnected from existing professional services, specific formulations of clinician-AI collaboration and migration paths between forms remain vague. In this viewpoint, we introduce four approaches to AI-human integration in mental health service delivery. To inform future research and policy, these four approaches are addressed through four dimensions of impact: access to care, quality, clinician-patient relationship, and patient self-disclosure and sharing. Although many research questions are yet to be investigated, we view safety, trust, and oversight as crucial first steps. If conversational AI isn’t safe it should not be used, and if it isn’t trusted, it won’t be. In order to assess safety, trust, interfaces, procedures, and system level workflows, oversight and collaboration is needed between AI systems, patients, clinicians, and administrators.
Highlights
Clinicians engage in conversations with patients to establish a patient-therapist relationship, make diagnoses, and provide treatment
With few exceptions, such as immediate risk of serious harm to the patient or others, clinicians need explicit permission to share identifiable patient information. When one of these exceptions is invoked, there is an obligation to limit the sharing strictly to the extent needed to provide effective treatment and ensure safety [16, 17]. Against this backdrop, having conversational artificial intelligence (AI) listen to psychotherapy sessions or talk directly with patients represents a departure from established practice
As conversational AI takes on clinical duties and informs clinical judgment, expectations must be clarified about how and when these systems will respond to issues related to confidentiality, safety, and liability
Summary
UC Davis Health, United States Peter Yellowlees, University of California,Davis. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way mental health care is delivered. By gathering diagnostic information, facilitating treatment, and reviewing clinician behavior, conversational AI is poised to impact traditional approaches to delivering psychotherapy. While this transition is not disconnected from existing professional services, specific formulations of clinician-AI collaboration and migration paths between forms remain vague. In this viewpoint, we introduce four approaches to AI-human integration in mental health service delivery.
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