LEWISBURG, W.Va. (WVDN) – At WVU Medicine United Hospital Center in Bridgeport, W.Va., Brittanie West, D.O., is helping to shape the future of medicine. An educator and family medicine physician who spends much of her time teaching residents and medical students, West was an early adopter of artificial intelligence tools.
At the heart of the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine (WVSOM) Class of 2015 graduate’s work lies a simple idea: Technology, used wisely, can benefit physicians, their students and their patients.
West integrates AI into both sides of her career. As a clinician who has taught continuing medical education sessions on precision medicine — “getting the right diagnosis and the right treatment to the right patient at the right time,” as she puts it — West employs artificial intelligence to perform genetic risk analysis and to tailor medications to a patient’s genetic makeup. Without AI assisting in processing genetic data, neither approach would be practical, she explained.
“I do a lot with pharmacogenomics: I look at your genes and how you respond to medications so that I can intelligently choose which one you should be on. In pharmacogenomics, the volume of information is so large that artificial intelligence is the only way to get it in the hands of physicians in a useful way,” she said.
West pointed to an AI-based tool that can tell physicians which patients they should avoid prescribing, say, a popular blood thinner designed to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.
“Certain people carry an enzyme in the liver that makes them unable to metabolize Plavix fast enough. The Mayo Clinic has built clinical decision support software that loads this information into a patient’s record, and it pops up with a box saying, ‘Don’t give this patient Plavix’ and offers alternatives,” she said. “Some people carry a gene that gives them an increased risk for a terrible skin disorder called Stevens-Johnson syndrome if they take the mood stabilizer Lamictal. With AI, I can use their DNA to predict that ahead of time.”
As a physician who spends about 70% of her time educating other medical professionals, West also has found AI to be a valuable tool in optimizing the learning process. For example, she finds the technology useful in creating asynchronous teaching modules for resident physicians.
“We created a lecture series, and I used software called Articulate to help build our modules. I can load any resources I want — information from the American Academy of Family Physicians, medical textbooks, peer-reviewed articles. I give it the learning objectives and it matches them to the info I loaded and auto-generates a module. I still have to go in and tweak things on the back end, but what once took about 25 hours now takes four hours,” she said.
That efficiency allows West to spend more time with her patients.
“In the clinic, the busier you get, the less time there is for human connection, for things like OMM and for getting to know your patients personally,” she said. “Anything we can do to buy back providers’ time will help them connect better with the people they’re serving.”
She has found that artificial intelligence can, perhaps ironically, help physicians learn a deeply human skill: communicating effectively with the individuals they care for. Through a partnership with Xuron, a company that uses realistic simulations to help learners practice clinical communication, West builds virtual patients powered by a large language model. These digital avatars allow resident physicians to practice, among other things, sensitive conversations such as delivering upsetting news to a family or verbally screening for conditions that require special tact from a physician.
“You can ask the avatar anything and it will respond appropriately. It’s not scripted,” she said. “For example, we created a scenario dealing with postpartum depression. One of the ways it’s diagnosed is by administering the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, which includes questions that could seem invasive: Are you sleeping when the baby’s sleeping? Do you have thoughts of hurting yourself or hurting the baby? Questions like that can be awkward for residents or might be delivered in a tone where the patient feels judged. With the avatar, a resident can practice these conversations until they feel comfortable.”
In that sense, she said, artificial intelligence can help produce a more empathetic physician workforce.
“In medicine, we spend a lot of time talking about knowledge, technical skills, clinical skills and surgical skills. Those are obviously important. But at the core of everything we do is communication, because it affects whether patients trust us, it affects their adherence and it affects the overall patient experience. If AI can help learners practice communicating before they’re in a real-life conversation that carries emotional weight, I think that’s really meaningful,” she said.
For West — who began a two-year term on the American Osteopathic Information Association’s digital health innovation steering committee in June — preparing young doctors for an increasingly technology-based health care system is something all medical educators should prioritize.
“The learners I work with are growing up in a time when AI and tech will become a large part of their practice, and one of my jobs is to make sure they know what that world will look like,” she said. “Innovation isn’t a luxury, it’s a responsibility.”
