MAY 14, 2025
A new National Institutes of Health–supported clinical trial shows an artificial intelligence tool is as effective as healthcare providers when generating referrals to addiction specialists (Nat Med 2025 Apr 3. doi:10.1038/s41591-025-03603-z).
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health compared physician-led addiction specialist consultations for opioid use disorder at the hospital to the performance of their AI screening tool, which had
A new National Institutes of Health–supported clinical trial shows an artificial intelligence tool is as effective as healthcare providers when generating referrals to addiction specialists (Nat Med 2025 Apr 3. doi:10.1038/s41591-025-03603-z).
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health compared physician-led addiction specialist consultations for opioid use disorder at the hospital to the performance of their AI screening tool, which had been developed and validated in prior work.
They implemented the AI screening tool between March and October 2023 to assist the healthcare providers and remind them throughout hospitalization of a patient’s need for an addiction specialist’s care. The trial screened 51,760 adult hospitalizations, with 66% occurring without deploying the AI screener and 34% with the AI screener deployed hospital-wide. A total of 727 addiction medicine consultations were completed during the study period.
“Our study represents one of the first demonstrations of an AI screening tool embedded into addiction medicine and hospital workflows, highlighting the pragmatism and real-world promise of this approach,” said Majid Afshar, MD, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and lead author of the study.
The trial found that AI-prompted consultation was just as effective as provider-initiated consultation, ensuring no decrease in quality while offering a more scalable and automated approach. Specifically, the study showed that 1.51% of hospitalized adults received an addiction medicine consultation when healthcare professionals used the AI screening tool, compared with 1.35% without the assistance of the AI tool. The AI screener also was associated with fewer 30-day readmissions, with approximately 8% of hospitalized adults in the AI screening group being readmitted to the hospital, compared with 14% in the traditional provider-led group.
Compared with patients who received provider-initiated consultations, patients with AI screening had 47% lower odds of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days after their initial discharge. This reduction in readmissions translated to a total of nearly $109,000 in estimated healthcare savings during the study period.
Based on a press release from the NIH.
