Dr Flora on the Implications of Emerging AI Models for Oncology Care

"For providers, the most exciting things this year will be more of us having access to the tools that will record our visits with patients and document the important things that were discussed in [those rooms]. [This will] hopefully [reduce] burnout by saving us from staring at the computer all day and letting us look at our patients once again."

Douglas B. Flora, MD, LSSBB, the executive medical director of Oncology Services and the Robert and Dell Ann Sathe Endowed Chair in Oncology at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, discussed the evolving use of generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) and their potential effects on cancer care.

The emergence of GPTs has marked a significant inflection point in the evolution of digital health care, with implications for oncology and clinical practice more broadly, Flora began. The widespread availability of several GPT models has catalyzed integration across numerous facets of medicine, including the automation of clinical trial screening processes through electronic health record systems, such as Epic and Cerner, he detailed. These models can rapidly identify patients who meet clinical trial inclusion or exclusion criteria by parsing structured and unstructured clinical data, thereby accelerating trial enrollment and improving patient access to experimental therapies, Flora explained.

In clinical workflows, GPT-based applications are increasingly being explored for treatment selection and clinical decision support, offering the potential to synthesize vast volumes of biomedical literature, guidelines, and patient-specific data into actionable insights, Flora continued. One of the most tangible near-term effects of this technology for health care providers is the use of artificial intelligence–driven tools to automate clinical documentation, he noted. These systems, capable of recording patient encounters and extracting key clinical information, may reduce administrative burden and mitigate physician burnout by enabling providers to re-engage more fully with patient care rather than electronic documentation, Flora said. Responsible integration of GPT tools will depend on ongoing validation, regulatory oversight, and user education to ensure that these systems enhance—not compromise—clinical care, he concluded.