Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Screening, Brief Intervention & Referral to Treatment (SBIRT): Using the Brief Negotiation Interview (BNI) Across Diverse Populations

Screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment (SBIRT) is an evidence-based approach to the treatment of a wide variety of medical conditions (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and opioid use, treatment engagement and adherence, asthma control, elder abuse disclosure, and exercise, among many others). While SBIRT is efficacious, it is not widely adopted or implemented. Some of the reasons for this are lack of training, time, expert providers, and funding. Thus, there is a critical need to develop effective, standardized, acceptable and time- and cost-efficient ways of implementing SBIRT, such as technology-enabled solutions, including those that do not rely on human interventionists. This symposium will present a series of papers that will each describe the current and ongoing development of such technology enabled SBIRT, focusing specifically on the Brief Negotiation Interview (BNI), one of the most robustly efficacious approaches to SBIRT. Each of the papers will also describe their efforts at incorporating artificial intelligence (e.g., machine learning, natural language processing) into this work, which spans such diverse populations as individuals with high-risk drinking, uncontrolled asthma, elder abuse, and opioid use disorder, as well as medical trainees who are using a web-based application to learn to implement the BNI with their patients. Special attention will be paid by each presenter to the potential ethical issues posed by AI.