Bridging the Skills Gap: Evaluating an AI-Assisted Provider Platform to Support Care Providers with Empathetic Delivery of Protocolized Therapy
This addresses the global shortage of mental health providers by enabling less-trained individuals to deliver protocolized therapy more effectively, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI support methods.
The study tackled the shortage of mental health providers by developing an AI-assisted platform (A2P2) to support care delivery, resulting in a 29.34% decrease in response times, tripled empathic response accuracy, and a 66.67% increase in goal recommendation accuracy compared to a control group.
Despite the high prevalence and burden of mental health conditions, there is a global shortage of mental health providers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods have been proposed as a way to address this shortage, by supporting providers with less extensive training as they deliver care. To this end, we developed the AI-Assisted Provider Platform (A2P2), a text-based virtual therapy interface that includes a response suggestion feature, which supports providers in delivering protocolized therapies empathetically. We studied providers with and without expertise in mental health treatment delivering a therapy session using the platform with (intervention) and without (control) AI-assistance features. Upon evaluation, the AI-assisted system significantly decreased response times by 29.34% (p=0.002), tripled empathic response accuracy (p=0.0001), and increased goal recommendation accuracy by 66.67% (p=0.001) across both user groups compared to the control. Both groups rated the system as having excellent usability.