15,000 patients at Mass General Brigham don't have a primary care doctor
Their solution? An AI chatbot called Care Connect that interviews patients, reviews their medical records, and suggests diagnoses before connecting them to a telehealth physician.
15,000 patients at Mass General Brigham don't have a primary care doctor.
Their solution? An AI chatbot called Care Connect that interviews patients, reviews their medical records, and suggests diagnoses before connecting them to a telehealth physician.
One patient, Tammy MacDonald, was told she'd have to wait two years to see a doctor after hers died suddenly. She called 10 practices. None were taking new patients. With Care Connect, she got an appointment within 48 hours.
AI in healthcare is here to stay. But we need to be smart about how we use it.
Here's the problem: Critics point out that AI tools can't assess whether patients can afford follow-up care or get to that appointment. They have no insight into family dynamics or caretaking needs, things that primary physicians come to understand through long-term personal relationships.
Steven Lin, chief of primary care at Stanford, put it well: "In its current state, the safest use of this tool is for more urgent care issues. Your upper respiratory tract infections. Your urinary tract infections. Your musculoskeletal injuries. Your rashes." For patients with multiple chronic conditions, nothing beats a human who sees you regularly.
The real issue isn't a shortage of doctors. It's a workflow crisis. Primary care physicians spend 2 hours on admin for every 1 hour with patients. Hiring more doctors into a broken system just burns out more doctors.
AI can help. But only if the human in the loop does real follow-up, not just rubber-stamps what the algorithm suggests.
The fix isn't replacing doctors with chatbots. It's removing the friction that keeps doctors from doing what they trained for: caring for patients.
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