Bridging the Skills Gap: Evaluating an AI-Assisted Provider Platform to
  Support Care Providers with Empathetic Delivery of Protocolized Therapy
William R. Kearns Jessica Bertram Myra Divina Lauren Kemp Yinzhou Wang Alex Marin Trevor Cohen Weichao Yuwen
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.