When Dr. Tra’chella Johnson Foy greets her patients, she sits across from them facing away from the pc within the exam room. Then, she pulls out her phone, and asks for permission to record the appointment.
“It listens in on our visit so I will pay more attention to you,” explains Foy, a family physician at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida, while looking straight at her patient.
Foy and other doctors at Baptist Health have been using the DAX app, powered by artificial intelligence, from Microsoft’s Nuance division since last yr. This system transcribes doctors’ and patients’ comments, then creates a clinical physician summary formatted for an electronic health record.
Dr. Trachella Johnson
CNBC
The app frees doctors from having to type up notes during patient visits, and from having to finish them up at night. A practice so common doctors have a nickname for it.
“Pajama time — which needs to be the time where you are preparing to wind down and go to bed. We’re often still charting and noting and doing things which are going to enhance the lifetime of the patient but not necessarily our own quality of life,” Foy said.
The fee of tackling burnout
Harnessing AI programs to put pajama time to rest, and helping doctors and nurses fight burnout, is a top priority for Baptist Health’s chief digital and knowledge officer Aaron Miri.
“There’s latest economies of scale … that healthcare will have the opportunity to get into [by] leveraging AI,” Miri said. “You eliminate all the executive redundancy, and bureaucracy overhead, and you permit folks to work at top of license.”
Administrative processes like documenting visits, requesting insurance pre-authorization for procedures, and processing bills account for about 25% of health care costs, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.
The researchers estimate adopting AI to simplify those tasks could help hospitals cut their total costs by 5% to 11% in the subsequent five years, while physician groups could achieve up to 8% savings, and health insurers up to 10%.
However the upfront investment won’t be low-cost: An Advisory Board survey of health care executives last yr found that one in 4 expected to see costs for artificial intelligence and analytics increase 25%.
Larger health systems like Baptist could also be in a greater position to fund that investment than smaller hospitals, and more likely to have the tech staffing to help integrate the brand new generative A.I. solutions.
“If it cost me X, but I just made my patients a complete lot happier and my physicians a complete lot more productive? Well, there’s a solution right there by itself,” said Miri.
Keeping people in the combination
Without delay, hospital systems working with the brand new generative AI programs to automate administrative tasks are requiring doctors and nurses to check over the automated documents before they’re included in medical records.
“What organizations are doing is that they’re these high-impact use cases, but additionally ensuring that they mitigate the risks and searching at ways in which we will select the scenarios where we put a human in the center,” said Dr. David Rhew, chief medical officer and VP of healthcare for Microsoft’s Worldwide Industrial Business.
But there are concerns that as organizations look to cut costs and boost efficiency, automation could take humans out of the combination.
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb worries that generative AI could eventually eliminate some doctors’ jobs by creating “large language models that operate fully automated, parsing the whole lot of a patient’s medical record to diagnose conditions and prescribe treatments directly to the patient, and not using a physician within the loop.”
Patients are also wary of how the technology may very well be used for their very own care. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed in CNBC’s All America Survey last month said they’d be uncomfortable with AI getting used to diagnose medical issues.
Dr. Lloyd Minor, the dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, worries more about how the fast-moving technology may very well be used to impact patient access to care.
“My deepest fear is that medical data is utilized in a pernicious way, either to block access to the suitable healthcare, or to distort the best way that health care is delivered,” said Minor, who helped launch an initiative to promote responsible use of AI.
Last month, health insurers Cigna and UnitedHealthcare were each sued over the use of conventional computer algorithms to deny medical claims.
“Generative AI should open doors for access, it should provide pathways for providing equitable care which have not existed up to now,” Minor said.
In July, the White House secured a pledge from seven of the leading U.S. firms in artificial intelligence to commit to collaborating throughout the industry to construct in safeguards into the fast-evolving technology.
The group included Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft — all three have launched generative AI products for health care.
Health systems are already a preferred goal for hackers and data thieves, despite rigorous regulatory privacy requirements. Generative AI is developing so quickly, the fear is that efforts to develop safety guardrails for the brand new technology are already playing catch up.
“It’s extremely essential for us as a society to embrace the responsible AI principles of having the ability to move forward… in order that the great actors are defining the longer term and never allowing the bad actors to potentially define that,” said Rhew.