The potential of AI in shaping the future of personalized patient advocacy

Patient advocacy refers to activities aimed at safeguarding and enhancing the rights and overall well-being of patients and caregivers. Traditionally, patient advocates have been involved in protecting patient rights, helping navigate the complexities of medical care, communicating with healthcare providers and administrators, and ensuring access to optimal care.

This multifaceted discipline, which began emerging in the mid-twentieth century, has evolved significantly over the past thirty years due to advancements in medicine and technology.

In oncology, patient advocacy has been instrumental in raising awareness about cancer trends, supporting the importance of cancer support groups, and mediating between patients, healthcare practitioners, and health maintenance organizations.

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Personalized Patient Advocacy

The significant impact of traditional patient advocates in oncology, such as improving patient outcomes through advocacy, has led to the push for personalized patient advocacy.

This approach mirrors the trend towards precision medicine, where care is tailored to individual needs rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Personalized patient advocacy integrates patients’ genomic, phenotypic, and medical data into the advocacy process, allowing advocates to provide more individualized support.

This shift enhances the empathetic and emotional intelligence of advocates by incorporating specific patient information into decision-making.

Personalized Patient Advocacy in Africa

In Africa, while patient advocacy is not entirely new, it is still in its early stages. Early patient rights initiatives emerged with medical rehabilitation programs in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia.

Today, some degree of patient advocacy exists in mental health, orthopaedics, and virology clinics, where social workers, patient carers, or health assistants represent patients’ interests. Despite these efforts, cancer advocacy remains minimal and lacks comprehensive data to validate its impact.

Notable cancer advocacy groups have emerged in Africa, such as the Breast Cancer Association in Nigeria, People Living with Cancer in South Africa, and the 50 Plus Campaign in Tanzania, which focuses on prostate cancer.

Challenges to effective patient advocacy in Africa include inadequate oncology infrastructure, insufficient government funding for research, and poor awareness about cancer due to illiteracy and stigma.

For instance, Nigeria records over 100,000 new cancer cases annually, with issues like a shortage of oncologists and treatment facilities exacerbating the situation. When patient advocacy is personalized in Africa through the integration of AI tools and algorithms into its processes, the crucial advantages that will be achieved include efficiency in decision-making, prevention of treatment errors, reduction of medical costs and promotion of patient/practitioner safety and satisfaction.

Impacts of AI on Medicine in Africa

The wealth of impacts that AI has had on healthcare in Africa has not been fully documented. This is because its integration into medical practice (called medical artificial intelligence) in the region is still in its developmental phase.

However, the four notable areas where AI has shown promising potential in African medicine include population health, pharmaceutical and health technology, health systems and individualized care. Some of these impacts include:

1. Medical Diagnosis and Referral: digital devices and chatbots have played crucial roles in mitigating the shortage of health workers in Africa by lessening the frequency of hospital visits and triaging patients. Also, apps such as Ubenwa and CAD4TB have emerged that aid the diagnosis of malaria, tuberculosis and birth asphyxia.
2. Attenuation of Disease Outbreaks and Immunization: medical artificial intelligence has aided programs where epidemics are recurrent through optimized reporting and documentation. They have also facilitated vaccination programs by improving community awareness and logistics programs.
3. Drug Safety and Detection of Counterfeits: AI tools have improved measures put in place by drug control bodies of African nations. An MIT open-source software was utilized to develop an app called FD-Detector by five Nigerian high school girls to identify spurious medications in 2018 while the Pharmacist, Adebayo Alonge, designed an AI-hyperspectral portal called RxScanner to authenticate drugs.
4. Health System efficiency: medical artificial intelligence saves time and resources by improving the efficiency of administrative and clinical services. There are instances where routine tasks such as filling patient charts, prescribing medications and documenting health records are being automated.

Owing to the developments noted in these areas, it is expected that personalized treatment is the next step for artificial intelligence to gain ground in Africa due to its ability to process myriads of research papers, genetic information and patient variabilities and identify key trends for decision makers in oncology. 

AI and the Future of Personalized Patient Advocacy in Africa

Similar to how AI is somewhat revolutionizing medical diagnosis, pharmacovigilance and health systems, AI has the potential to transform personalized patient advocacy in Africa

In oncology especially, it can offer several benefits. Medical artificial intelligence could exponentially improve how incipient cancer advocacy groups discharge their duties. These benefits include:

1. Personalized Guidance and Support: AI can enable advocates to provide individualized support by integrating patient-specific data which is a move beyond generic approaches. AI-driven healthcare platforms are transforming the way patient data is processed, allowing for highly individualized patient experiences. It integrates various sources of patient-specific information such as genetic, lifestyle, and environmental data to create customized support plans. This shift takes advocacy beyond generic guidance, enabling advocates to address each patient’s unique needs more effectively. With its capacity to learn and adapt, patient advocates can deliver continuous, data-driven, and tailored guidance that adjusts as the patient’s condition evolves.
2. Improved Patient Outcomes: AI can enhance monitoring services provided by cancer advocates by detecting patterns and trends that are beyond human capacity, thereby improving treatment outcomes. Its ability to process large quantities of real-time data enhances the precision of monitoring systems used by cancer advocates.
   
   Predictive analytics can also identify subtle patterns in health data, that human providers might miss. These insights can lead to early detection of complications, more accurate disease progression tracking, and timely interventions, all of which can improve patient outcomes.
   
   In all, AI can elevate the quality of care by offering decision support tools that can suggest optimal treatment paths and manage risks more effectively
3. Crafting Personalized Treatment Plans: AI’s ability to analyze large volumes of data can help create customized treatment plans, reducing redundancy, minimizing costs, and avoiding potential treatment errors. Its data-crunching abilities allow for the design of highly personalized treatment plans.
   
   By analyzing vast amounts of patient information, AI reduces treatment redundancies and minimizes medical errors. The integration of AI also streamlines the decision-making process, ensuring that treatment plans are not only customized but also cost-efficient.
   
   AI can also compare patient profiles and outcomes, ensuring that advocates provide optimal recommendations that avoid unnecessary treatments and costs.
4. Remote Monitoring and Management: Wearable devices equipped with remote sensors collect real-time health data, allowing advocates to monitor conditions and inform healthcare providers of necessary interventions, promoting overall well-being.
   
   The use of these devices is a significant advancement in AI-driven healthcare. Remote sensors, combined with AI algorithms, provide continuous, real-time monitoring of patients. This technology allows patient advocates to track vital signs, detect early warning signals, and provide healthcare providers with actionable insights.
   
   The ability to monitor patients remotely means that advocates can intervene more quickly and reduce the need for hospital visits. This eventually promotes a proactive approach to patient care and improves their overall well-being.

Conclusion

As healthcare systems in Africa continue to advance and integrate technology, digital devices and AI are set to play a crucial role in enhancing personalized patient advocacy.

By leveraging AI tools and algorithms, advocates can offer more targeted and effective support, improving patient outcomes and advancing cancer therapy. The continued collaboration between technology and personalized advocacy promises significant progress in patient care and support across the continent.

About the author

Oluwatobiloba Oguntoyinbo is a Patient Advocate and Clinical Research Professional with over five years of experience, focused on improving cancer care and leveraging AI for personalized advocacy.

From 2018 to 2024, Oluwatobiloba worked as a Research Associate at Obafemi Awolowo and Western Kentucky Universities, focusing on cellular and molecular genetics and cancer biology with several published articles. In 2022, she founded SyncedCancer (formerly Cancer Hope), a blog that provides practical resources for cancer patients, reaching over 50,000 people with impactful content.

She presently works with Tennessee Oncology, one of the largest community-based cancer care organizations in the U.S.