Heart failure patients are increasingly using AI to assist in healthcare, a change that is exciting to Jonathan Hourmozdi, MD, a core faculty member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence at Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, and Faraz Ahmad, MD, associate director of the center.
Dr. Hourmozdi and Dr. Ahmad joined Becker’s “Cardiology + Heart Surgery Podcast” to discuss how patients are using AI and how that use may change.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: We’re talking about it from the point of view of the system and the clinician, but patients are using AI more and more. How patients are using AI today, and what an AI-powered future will look like for patients with heart failure and their clinicians in the next three to five years?
Dr. Jonathan Hourmozdi: AI shows up in a lot more ways than even we expect. There’s so much value in wearable data for patients to identify earlier changes in their own physiology and bring those up to their providers. I’m seeing, with a lower barrier to entry, more and more of my heart failure patients engaging with health data in a meaningful way, as a result of some aspect of their consumer wearable technology equipped with algorithmic and sensor data that turns that information into something interpretable — and lets them alert me, as their healthcare provider, that something may have changed.
The other way is generative AI and large language models. People are engaging with them now on their phones and on any internet-enabled device — asking questions and learning from these models. Many use it to explore the care they’re receiving and get additional advice about taking care of themselves. Patients with heart failure often have a lot of questions about diet, exercise, fluid restriction, salt, and I’m seeing patients increasingly go to LLMs for a first pass, then bring those answers to me: “I got this printout from whatever LLM I subscribe to, and I wanted to go through it with you to see if this advice was right. Here are some questions my LLM friend told me to ask you.” It’s a really interesting and emergent thing, happening by virtue of the fact that these tools are now widely available to consumers. They’re powerful foundational models and they do bring a lot of general knowledge, but we have to be careful — and thoughtful about greenlighting the use of these tools — and really encourage patients to engage with us as their healthcare team as they’re learning from these models, so they don’t stray too far from the evidence base.
Right now, AI, when it’s used, is very visible — it’s in your feed, you know there’s a chatbot, there’s an automated phone call happening. I’d love to see it become invisible, incorporated into every access point of care. Right now there’s friction everywhere: difficulty scheduling appointments, difficulty getting follow-up testing, difficulty understanding lab results, difficulty getting real-time feedback about medication changes. The ability for agentic AI to be an invisible, natural interface and reduce friction at each of those steps is coming, and it’s amazing — because it’s going to improve access to care and allow for more of the time you actually want with the clinician, talking about your health, asking the questions that matter to you, and having somebody who’s really listening and able to explain things well. We’ve already had a sample of that, and I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve across all these friction points.
Dr. Faraz Ahmad: I completely agree that patients are using this all the time, whether it’s the wearables they’re purchasing, the medical-grade devices we’re already using for heart failure care, or just tools like ChatGPT and Claude to answer their questions. I imagine this is a lot like what clinicians experienced back when Google came out and patients gained access to information, but this is turbocharged. The barrier to using these LLMs is so low and what you get back can be so crisp. It’s an exciting time where patients really educate themselves. I think we as a community are still trying to figure out how to educate patients on how to use these tools.
In terms of the next three to five years, our hope is that we see AI in every aspect of heart failure care — from initial diagnosis through treatment, from when a patient calls the health system and gets scheduled for a visit, through their entire treatment journey. Like many people, I’m really excited about agents. We’ve already seen agents in Utah helping with medication renewals. We’ve seen an FDA clearance for an LLM use case in insulin titration. I think we’ll see more and more use cases around heart failure — especially starting with lower-risk aspects of heart failure care — using agents to talk to patients, make recommendations with appropriate oversight, and really be part of care.
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