Healthcare startups that are offering hospitals and health systems similar AI-based technology such as the one used in ChatGPT could make headways into the industry as organizations look to ease provider burnout and increase automation, The Wall Street Journal reported March 21.
The University of Kansas Health System recently partnered with AI-powered medical documentation company Abridge to deploy one of the earliest large-scale uses of generative AI in healthcare.
The health system will roll out generative AI technology to more than 140 locations. The aim is to use Abridge's health documentation technology to summarize medical conversations.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is also using Abridge's AI-based technology to digitize virtual primary-care conversations.
"For many hospital technology leaders, lessening physicians' documentation burden is a top priority," Robert Bart, MD, chief medical information officer at UPMC told the Journal.
UPMC also said it plans to do a large-scale roll out of Abridge's platform once the tool is integrated into EHR systems.
Jeff Cribbs, an analyst covering healthcare technology at market research and consulting firm Gartner, said this type of generative AI, which assists clinicians with documentation and synthetic data are considered "lower stakes," as they have a less direct impact on patients.
But, generative AI such as ChatGPT isn't ready for the healthcare setting just yet as it currently pulls from existing medical and popular literature to answer clinical questions, which may not always be accurate.