2025 AI in Serious Illness Care Series
Even as every sector of industry is exploding with AI tools and applications, healthcare has been relatively slow to adopt them, due to real concerns over data privacy, constraining regulations, and the stakes of life-or-death decisions. Clinicians and system leaders in serious illness care, including advanced disease, palliative, and hospice care, have been yet more hesitant. We have claimed as our ground skills that rely on provider − patient interaction, human connection, empathy, conversation, discernment, judgement, ethical decision making – not characteristics that are easily or historically associated with machine intelligence. This hesitancy, even resistance, will be a challenge for leaders to overcome. Artificial Intelligence is coming to palliative care. CCCC is here to help you prepare with these outstanding educational offerings. Purchase one, a few, or all 12.
Purchase the full 12-video series of AI in Serious Illness Care. This item includes all the courses below.
Navigating Responsible Use of Health AI in Serious Illness Care
This session focuses on a describing the principles and technical specifics of Responsible AI as they apply to several use-cases in serious illness care, including palliative care, hospice care, and advance directives. We discuss how to apply these principles and mitigate certain challenges in AI, including bias, governance, and model alignment.
AI Decoded: Basics and Applications of AI for Serious Illness Care Providers
In this presentation, Dr. Catherine Shoults, VP of AI & Analytics at SymBiosis, outlines the basics of AI and machine learning for a clinical audience. She covers the types of AI and ML and how they are created, provides an overview of applications and ethical considerations of AI/ML for serious illness care, and gives a glimpse into the future of AI and how it will affect those providing compassionate care to seriously ill patients and their families. This presentation provides an excellent foundation for those new to the field or anyone needing a framework for understanding the rapid evolution of AI in our domain.
The Future of Identity: Exploring the Implications of Digital Immortality
The creation and maintenance of digital twins have implications for serious illness care, affecting legacy creation, bereavement, and the very meaning and experience of life and death. Andy LoCascio, co-founder and CTO of Eternos.Life, will offer an introduction to the concept of digital immortality, digital legacy building, the line between the human and the digital self, ownership of digital assets and identify, privacy and security, social and ethical considerations. There will be ample time for audience questions.
AI for Advance Care Planning
This session focuses on the uses of AI to facilitate advance care planning and goals of care conversations. Three innovative physicians will describe their work and the challenges associated with introducing machine intelligence into conversations that touch our most human features: vulnerability, frailty, fear, hope, mortality, and compassion.
2025 AI Topics, Tools, and Use Cases for Serious Illness Care Virtual MiniConference
The Role of AI in the Global Healthcare Capacity Crisis: What Leaders Need to Know
The gap between the capacity of the healthcare workforce and the need for care of seriously ill patients is only deepening. A major factor in clinician burnout is the administrative burden of clinical practice and the vastness of information and knowledge required to keep up. Artificial intelligence holds the promise to significantly mitigate burdens, augment clinical decision making, and return aspects of humanity to the work. However, there are risks, not just technical and ethical, but from prioritizing business and financial incentives and outcomes over improvements in patient care. This presentation addresses these issues and makes a call for courageous leadership in a pivotal time for healthcare across the globe.
AI at the Bedside: A Nurse's Perspective on Implementation
This session explores Cedars-Sinai’s implementation of an AI-powered voice dictation technology to enhance nursing workflows by reducing administrative burden, improving efficiency, and elevating the patient experience. It covers key strategies for successful adoption of AI implementations, especially for nurses, including staff training, workflow integration, building staff buy-in, and the organization's approach to AI governance in ensuring safe and effective use.
The Patient Perspective on AI in Serious Illness Care
With consumer-directed AI applications proliferating, patients will likely adopt and use AI even before their providers get up to speed. This panel highlights three longtime patient activists and advocates harnessing the latest technology – wearables, scribes and agents, note summaries, translation and interpretation, research assistants and more – to empower people living with serious illness and those who care for them.
Using AI to Provide Optimal Palliative Care
AI is transforming palliative care by enabling proactive, personalized interventions that improve patient outcomes and experiences. This session explores how AI-driven insights, remote monitoring, and predictive analytics help providers detect complications early, optimize care coordination, and reduce hospitalizations. Attendees will gain practical strategies for integrating AI tools into clinical and operational workflows to enhance patient-centered support.
Bias Mitigation in AI: Separating the Good from the Bad
Bias continues to make its way into our healthcare algorithms large and small, and if unaddressed has the potential to cause harm to our patients. The goal of this session is to equip the clinician with tools to understand the potential sources of bias in AI and strategies for bias detection and mitigation.
Compassionate AI and AI-Augmented Compassion
In this talk, we explore ways in which AI is already present in caregiving activities and how this may evolve in the next few years. We discuss if it is really possible to make AI compassionate, and if so, how can we help that happen? What are some fears and doubts about compassionate AI, and how might they be addressed? We also look at ways that AI could augment compassion in caregivers.
From a Patchwork to a Quilt – Emerging AI Policy Trends
This session provides an overview of the current state of play for federal and state regulations on health AI. It explores how policymakers are seeking to balance AI's transformative potential with concerns about safety, privacy, and bias, and provide an overview of where health AI regulation may head in the future.
Artificial Intelligence-based Mortality Prediction: The Promise and the Peril
Artificial intelligence-based mortality prediction can predict death in an automated fashion and with shocking accuracy. But what are the implications and potential unintended consequences for choice, fairness, and moral responsibility? This presentation explores the promise and peril of such tools for patient- and family-centered care.