Can AI Help You Die?

Doctors can be slow to talk about the end of the traditional medical road. When they’ve been trying to manage a life-threatening illness or keep a terminal patient alive, bringing up palliative or hospice care can feel like giving up. But these options can radically improve quality of life, or the end of life, when traditional medicine hasn’t helped enough—if patients and their doctors figure it out in time. Some providers just don’t recognize when the end is near until it’s very near, says Mihir Kamdar, a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who heads clinical health at a palliative-care startup called Tuesday Health. “When someone is actively declining, you can see it, but being able to predict before that happens is hard.”

Can artificial intelligence software do a better job than humans of picking that moment? That’s the idea behind Serious Illness Care Connect, a software tool that about 150 doctors are testing in a pilot program in New Jersey’s largest health-care network, Hackensack Meridian Health. Developed by an in-house team of data scientists and hospice providers, SICC is a statistical model trained on a year’s worth of anonymized Hackensack Meridian patient data. It gets built into the software doctors use to review and update patient records. The tool calculates the likelihood that a patient will die within six months, a common medical benchmark for these kinds of decisions.