Human-AI collaborative generative AI for comfortable care: a doctor–patient–AI feedback loop for pre-operative distress and workforce shortages

Psychological screening is easily displaced by physiological safety checks when preoperative teams have little time and too few staff. Healthcare systems are already affected by widespread workforce shortages and clinician burnout. We suggest that preoperative anxiety consequently often remains unmanaged, with implications for postoperative recovery and hospital workload. Generic educational materials do not adequately address differences in patients’ anxiety, and “health data poverty” can further exclude vulnerable groups. We propose a conceptual human-machine collaborative (HMC) generative artificial intelligence framework to address these clinical and occupational problems together. In the proposed doctor–patient–AI feedback loop, natural language processing would dynamically assess psychosocial risk and guide patient-specific, multimodal education, including dialect-adapted voice agents, as a source of baseline emotional support. Routine interactions would be automated under clinician supervision. Our hypothesis is that this arrangement may conserve clinicians’ limited emotional bandwidth and allow healthier “cognitive reappraisal” in place of chronic fatigue. Implementation science provides a basis for considering how lightweight AI models could be scaled across regional health networks to bring standardized psychoeducation to under-resourced rural areas. This remains a theoretical pathway. Through sociotechnical governance and “data solidarity” to fairly manage algorithmic liability, the framework is still a conceptual framework, but it is operational: it proposes a path to improve perioperative workflows and health equity in the face of severe human resource constraints.