Discussion around artificial intelligence in healthcare has exploded as the technology looks promising in making healthcare more efficient, but is the discourse around the topic causing fatigue?
Will Weider, CIO and senior vice president of Wausau, Wis.-based Aspirus Health posted on LinkedIn, "I am suffering from AI discussion fatigue."
The CIO stated that excitement surrounding AI has yet to materialize into readily deployable transformative solutions in healthcare.
"It seems like my peers and I have not really done much other than stand up AI governance structures for technologies that have yet to materialize," he wrote. "Am I missing the boat? What are the real-world AI wins in healthcare?"
But Karandeep Singh, MD, inaugural chief health artificial intelligence officer of UC San Diego Health, told Becker's AI discussion fatigue isn't generally happening in the healthcare space.
"AI discussion fatigue in this case isn't coming from healthcare," he said. "It's coming from outside of healthcare as people continue discussing recent advancements in large language models like GPT 3.5, but for people in healthcare, the excitement is there."
According to Dr. Singh, healthcare organizations are actively engaging in pilot projects to explore the potential of AI in healthcare.
One notable example involves understanding patient safety reports, where large language models assist in identifying contributing factors to safety events more efficiently.
Additionally, the shift toward using AI in text analysis for tasks like medication identification signals a promising avenue for healthcare applications, according to Dr. Singh.
B.J. Moore, chief information officer of Renton, Wash.-based Providence, commented on Mr. Weider's post to share some of the use cases already in the works at his organization.
According to Mr. Moore, Providence has four customized generative AI solutions — Grace, Providence Chat, ProvAria and MedPear — that are actively "adding tremendous value for our customers, patients and caregivers."
Moreover, Mr. Moore said Providence is "finding great value in" Microsoft's M365 co-pilot, and is looking to deploy Oracle and Epic's generative AI capabilities.
But when assessing the impact of AI on healthcare transformation, Dr. Singh pointed out that it might be premature to make definitive judgments.
"I think it is way too soon to be making that call," he said. "The biggest place that large language models can help is in making sense of clinical text in the electronic health record. That text is unfortunately not easily accessed by AI tools, and there isn't a standardized place to put AI tools like large language models in the health IT environment. I think as these growing pains resolve, we will see more widespread use and impact from these tools."