About three dozen health systems recently aligned to learn how they could better scale AI and shape the direction of the technology together.
VALID AI unites 35-plus health systems with payers and industry associations to develop best practices for AI governance, evaluation and execution.
"I realized that no organization will have the capacity or talent or skill to conquer this amazing innovation that's happening in the gen AI space alone," VALID AI founding chair Ashish Atreja, MD, told Becker's (VALID stands for Vision, Alignment, Learning, Implementation and Dissemination).
Dr. Atreja recently transitioned from his role as chief information and digital health officer at Sacramento, Calif.-based UC Davis Health to focus on the organization — he remains a gastroenterologist and professor at the health system — and become a partner with investment firm GlobalVenturesX.
"Instead of all of us doing work in parallel and duplicating many times each other's work of what is possible, what is not, each use case then doing the vendor evaluation separately, we can be much more efficient with limited resources together," he said.
Also with AI, "the expense is huge," he said — from the yearslong process of building a team to bolstering cloud computing to support the technology.
"I met most of the organizations' CIOs, and one thing became clear: Many organizations have started in pilots, but the majority of them do not have the talent, skills and resources to do enterprisewide adoption of generative AI," he said. "It's not easy to get that talent, the talent is untested, and the technology is untested."
The organization is also looking to create a curriculum for generative AI training and build shared generative-AI-as-a-service capabilities.
AI scribes have already become "table stakes" in healthcare, Dr. Atreja said, with the cost dropping fourfold since they launched.
"It's like water," he said. "It should be everywhere, ubiquitous, and the price should be low."
VALID AI has work groups dedicated to ambient AI and social determinants of health. For AI scribes, the question becomes what to do with the time saved, Dr. Atreja said: "Do you fill those two hours saved in a day with more patients? Is your goal decreasing physician fatigue and burnout, or is your goal to increase productivity at the health system?"
He said AI prices are coming down, and some health systems are going with a multiple-vendor strategy, with less expensive companies that can handle the basics for some tasks and their competitors for more complex ones.
"We are also telling members to learn from one another's contracts as pricing stabilizes or bottoms out," he said. "Also, not everyone needs to use it. Some physicians and clinicians are very efficient. So you don't want to overlicense for something that's not going to be used."
The next evolution of AI scribes may lead to what he calls a "headless EMR," where clinicians will be able to access most of the things they need to know about a patient via voice command.
"For example, if I'm talking to a patient it may remind me, 'Hey, this patient has asthma, you need to ask some questions in an ACT [Asthma Control Test],'" he said. "You can place orders right there. It may evolve to where the interface between EMR and humans becomes completely AI."
He thinks we may start to see some early versions of "headless" EHR in three to four years.
"It's the start of an amazing intelligence layer on humans to patients that's happening," he said.
Beyond that, he expects care coordination to be automated by AI agents, or avatars.
"These AI avatars can be the biggest equity play in healthcare, because now people with any language can easily get access to a care agent that can help chat with them and address the care journey," he said. "It's creating an age of abundance by moving us from one-to-one care to one-to-many care and finally addressing the healthcare productivity paradox."
"What AI scribes have done to the clinician workforce, I believe AI avatars are going to do to patients," he added. "That's the next wave that's coming up."