Research on Artificial Intelligence and Primary Care: A Scoping Review

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the nature and extent of the body of research on artificial intelligence (AI) and primary care. Methods: We performed a scoping review, searching 11 published and grey literature databases with subject headings and key words pertaining to the concepts of 1) AI and 2) primary care: MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cinahl, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, MathSciNet, AAAI, arXiv. Screening included title and abstract and then full text stages. Final inclusion criteria: 1) research study of any design, 2) developed or used AI, 3) used primary care data and/or study conducted in a primary care setting and/or explicit mention of study applicability to primary care; exclusion criteria: 1) narrative, editorial, or textbook chapter, 2) not applicable to primary care population or settings, 3) full text inaccessible in the English Language. We extracted and summarized seven key characteristics of included studies: overall study purpose(s), author appointments, primary care functions, author intended target end user(s), target health condition(s), location of data source(s) (if any), subfield(s) of AI.