Nurses play a crucial role in shaping the use of AI-powered patient communications at UW Health, Chero Goswami, chief information and digital officer at UW Health, told Becker's.
Since April 2023, UW Health has been working with Microsoft and EHR vendor Epic to integrate generative AI into clinical practice. Specifically, the Madison, Wis.-based health system has been piloting generative AI developed by Microsoft and Epic to asynchronously draft responses to patient messages for providers.
"The technology generates a message and a human always edits it," Mr. Goswami said. "If they don't like it, they can modify or delete it."
Since April, the number of UW Health providers who have adopted the use of these messages has grown substantially, from 10 to more than 100. Mr. Goswami highlighted that the number of messages accepted or adopted with minimal changes is also increasing. According to UW Health, the pilot has resulted in the creation of more than 5,000 messages spanning across 30 departments.
Additionally, UW Health is continuing to observe the technology to refine the responses to give them more of a "UW Health flavor," Mr. Goswami told Becker's.
"We're observing how we can train the technology better," he said. "We're leveraging our data, providers and patient interactions, in order to customize the responses with the preferred style of UW Health."
But the technology, despite its promise, has not been rolled out at all of UW Health's clinics. The primary reasons are the health system wants to "take the time to do it right given its newness" and "respect the time it takes users to adopt and train to the technology," according to Mr. Goswami.
"To train nursing, it requires time, so you're stealing time for people who don't have time," he said. "So we are doing it appropriately by involving nurses in every step of the process and, most importantly, not just going live with it, but monitoring the utilization and the accuracy of the technology post implementation, because that's when the real responsibility lies."
Mr. Goswami said UW Health will start rolling this out across the board, but it may take months or even years out of respect for nurses' time commitments.