- September 19, 2025
- By Fid Thompson
“Would I be surprised if this person were not alive 12 months from now?”
This so-called “surprise question,” combined with clinical risk calculators, helps doctors make decisions about care for patients near the end of life. Increasingly, clinicians also use artificial intelligence (AI) models to predict remaining life expectancy and better inform palliative care decisions.
In a recent study out in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, a University of Maryland researcher sought to understand what palliative care teams think about these AI tools that give an estimated life expectancy or prognosis in end-of-life care, and found mixed reactions.
Mika Hamer, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health, and a team at the University of Colorado interviewed doctors, nurses, spiritual and religious guides, and social workers about their perspectives on AI end-of-life prognostication tools.
“There was consensus around the utility of AI prognostication for more accurately predicting how long someone has to live, which could inform what kinds of care they need or when they might qualify for hospice,” Hamer said. “But there was also deep concern about the sensitivity of this kind of data, and the potential for it to be used against the patient’s best interests.”
For example, some of the participants wondered about the potential for health insurance companies to use this information to deny hospice care, which Medicare covers in the final six months of life.
The research team found that the palliative care teams see AI models as companions to other prognostic and diagnostic tools, not as a replacement for end-of-life care decisions.
“Most palliative care practitioners said they saw AI as one tool in their toolkit that informs their clinical decisions—a screening tool of sorts,” Hamer said. “But they said that using AI-based prognostication alone would pose ethical issues.”