FEATURE STORY
Diverse Data, Healthier Futures How a Mount Mary team is using artificial intelligence to bring a human-centered approach to healthcare For Dr. Kari Inda, it all began with a desire to create a better patient experience. As an occupational therapist working with older adults, Inda encountered what she described as a “wealth of lived experiences” that she saw rendered invisible within residential care settings. Now the chair of Mount Mary University’s Occupational Therapy department, Inda credits this experience with helping her understand the importance of incorporating her patients’ unique personal backgrounds and cultures into creating personalized care plans designed to help them thrive.
Expanding Inclusive Data Access Throughout the development process, the team has effectively taught their bot to cultivate relent multiculturally appropriate data by “feeding” it with questions and prompts. Inda and her team are excited for the implications of reaching a wider cross section of people, an especially important consideration when delivering care to underserved populations such as African American, Latinx, Indigenous and LGBTQ+
The idea has since made significant strides toward becoming reality, as a team of Mount Mary Occupational Therapy faculty and students created the Culturabot™ app. The technology helps medical care providers design customized patient care plans using artificial intelligence (AI) to gather multicultural data from scientifically reliable open sources. This data includes culturally appropriate and plain language descriptions of care and ways to support access to healthcare services, allowing providers to gain valuable insights about their patients.
Many of our students come from communities where these disparities exist–why not use this knowledge to grow and become better informed and responsive in new ways? Dr. Kari Inda, chair of Occupational Therapy
4 | FALL 2024
communities. The team hopes this will ultimately create better, more collaborative and wider reaching healing outcomes. “Culturally sensitive care has been shown to improve the therapeutic experience,” said Inda. “Understanding the background and needs of each patient is central to this.” Inda described the process of working with emerging AI technology as both exciting and challenging. One of the biggest frustrations is what she described as “data limitations from a western point of view”
Scan this QR code to watch a video about the CulturabotTM project.