Designing AI-Augmented Healthcare Delivery Systems for Physician Buy-in and Patient Acceptance

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in augmenting healthcare is expected to grow substantially in future decades. Current research in medical AI focuses on developing, validating, and implementing point-level AI applications in an ad-hoc manner. To harness the full power of AI to improve the patient experience and outcomes at a societal scale, however, requires a gestalt shift—with systematic understanding of AI in the context of healthcare—and so results in its widespread adoption. This translates to four pillars of incorporating AI into healthcare workflow, including physician buy-in, patient acceptance, provider investment, and payer support (the “4Ps”). To achieve these 4Ps, it is imperative to design AI-augmented healthcare delivery systems in view of (1) how physicians integrate AI into their clinical practice and (2) how patients perceive the role of AI in healthcare delivery. This will in turn boost provider investment and payer support. In this paper, we draw from the literature to discuss a series of research questions, including barriers to physician buy-in and patient acceptance, transparency and disclosure, service design, and strategies for increasing AI uptake. We shed light on the principles of purposeful design for AI-augmented healthcare delivery systems and propose a research agenda for operations management scholars to consider as they continue to strengthen their engagement with both healthcare professionals and AI developers.