The marketing department at Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health has begun exploring the use of generative artificial intelligence to draft content, create images and personalize the communications experience for patients.
Adam Rice, senior vice president of marketing and communications at CommonSpirit Health, told Becker's the 143-hospital system is still in the early stages of figuring out how to leverage the new technology used in platforms such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, but that the goal will stay consistent.
"If we can create a better experience, ultimately that means our consumers, community members and patients can find information more easily and find the services they need more effectively," he said. "Does it offer us an opportunity from a resourcing perspective — meaning we can do more with less? Of course. But ultimately, it comes back down to that experience we're trying to deliver for the end user and the promise of using some of these tools alongside of our practitioners, to help make them more productive, to help them make more informed decisions, to help improve the effectiveness of our workflows, and so forth."
CommonSpirit's marketing department has already been employing basic AI and machine learning for years to analyze its campaigns and programs to optimize its spending decisions.
But its early use cases for generative AI include searching and indexing its image libraries to create new images based on what plays well with different audiences in different geographical areas; inputting multiple pieces of related content to write a rough draft on a given topic; and automating experience personalization campaigns or communications.
Mr. Rice said the health system is "still being very conservative with with our approach to actually doing anything other than co-piloting," so marketing and communications professionals will work side by side with AI for the foreseeable future.
"The promise is there. The capabilities are there," he said. "We're just taking a cautiously optimistic approach to what we're seeing."
He explained: "When we think about the manual nature of journey automation, when we think of this still somewhat manual nature of engagement and personalization, when we think of the amount of analysts that are still required in many cases to assess campaign performance, to assess use cases, outcomes and performance and connect those across a very large system like ours, having generative AI programs can help us take a lot of that manual effort and deliver insights, opportunities, automation and personalization far more effectively at scale."