Hospital and health system leaders have pointed to ethical and regulatory concerns as among the challenges posed by AI integration in healthcare. But where do leaders see the most potential in operational efficiency and reducing caregiver burnout?
Here are the areas four leaders highlighted as AI's potential in hospitals and health systems, as recently reported by Becker's.
1. Transcription and note-taking tools
Cliff Deveny, MD. President and CEO of Summa Health (Akron, Ohio): I am looking forward to wide adoption of ambient listening and automatic transcription for all caregivers (not only physicians). This will dramatically change the level of frustration all providers, nurses, respiratory therapists, etc., suffer daily. Imagine a world with fully transcribed notes with inputs from monitoring equipment, lab/imaging and relevant other findings from the patient medical archives ready for review and immediate AI assisted coding and submission for billing. This will provide more time for direct care and increased capacity of limited clinical resources while assuring more accurate claims submission, less denials and prompt pay.
Christopher O'Connor. CEO of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health: Yale New Haven Health is deploying novel AI note-taking tools to reduce the cognitive burden for clinicians, utilizing AI on our inpatient units in tools that help flag clinical deterioration and improve our response, and automating many business processes, such as prior authorization.
2. Personalizing treatment, predicting patient outcomes
J.P. Valin, MD. Chief Clinical Officer of Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City): One of the biggest misconceptions about healthcare in 2024 is the belief that artificial intelligence will replace human clinicians in determining patient treatment plans. Healthcare AI is designed to augment clinician care, not replace it with a machine. AI can assist in making more accurate diagnoses, predicting patient outcomes, and personalizing treatment plans, but the final decisions and care are still in the hands of human healthcare professionals.
3. Streamlining documentation
Julie Demaree. Executive Director of Clinical Innovation and Transformation for St. Mary's Hospital (Amsterdam, N.Y.): We use an efficiency dashboard to monitor how long it takes for providers to complete their notes, from start to sign-off. Before we implemented [AI assistant] Suki, some clinicians struggled to keep up with their documentation, often working late into the night or over weekends. But after going live with Suki, we saw a 50% reduction in the time it took for our first group of clinicians to complete their notes. One physician who always had over 130 open notes managed to clear them all within a week. She called the tool "life-changing."