Large language and multimodal models that respond with text explanations and ambient documentation in healthcare are on the cusp of change, UC San Diego Health's first chief health artificial intelligence officer, Karandeep Singh, MD, told the La Jolla Light in a Jan. 4 report.
Dr. Singh said artificial intelligence will influence the change healthcare will see regarding large language and multimodal models that respond with text explanations as well as with ambient documentation.
"Let's say someone is ready to go home and they've been in the hospital for a month. It can be a lot of work to accurately pull together, sort of in a nutshell, everything that happened to this person during that time," he told the publication. "And that can also be a challenge when a patient is handed off from one physician to another. So accurate summarization to reduce the documentation burden is another idea that's coming soon."
Regarding ambient documentation, Dr. Singh said instead of clinicians jotting down notes while looking at a computer screen, AI could allow physicians to have natural conversations with patients with the encounter being processed in real time.
He said with AI, this could go beyond simple transcription, encompassing the formatting of information in a manner that suits clinicians' documentation needs.
"That kind of technology is being tested now in a few places, but we haven't yet seen the big study that tells us whether it works or not," he said.