Reposting my guest article in Mexico Business News
t may feel like artificial intelligence (AI) has leapt from the realm of science fiction into everyday life overnight, but AI has been playing a key role in healthcare for years, assisting in everything from clinical decision support to scheduling optimization.
What’s new, however, is the widespread adoption of generative AI and powerful new language models like GPT-4.
While healthcare providers are already recognizing low-hanging fruit for AI, like summarizing virtual visits and generating clinical notes, they all too often overlook other areas where generative AI can have a huge impact.
From assisting providers with task reminders and easy access to additional context, to enhancing the patient experience, generative AI is poised to make an extraordinary difference in the here and now.
Obvious: More Patients, Less Paperwork
Ask any healthcare provider their least favorite part of the job and there’s a good chance they’ll point to paperwork.
Primary care physicians, nurses and therapists alike are drowning in tedious admin work, with tasks like inbox management, writing clinical notes and updating health records often eating up close to five hours per day, or 50% of their time.
These system inefficiencies and administrative burdens not only make it harder for clinicians to put patients first, but also contribute to provider burnout. As Dr. Christine Sinsky noted: “Physicians don’t leave their careers. They are leaving their inbox.”
It makes sense, then, that one of the most popular and best-known uses of generative AI in healthcare is streamlining admin.
Instead of spending hours manually drafting care summaries, care coordination notes, therapy progress notes and more, providers can use the power of generative AI to automatically create the right note as soon as a visit ends.
An AI can be trained on each organization’s best practices and documentation needs, analyze the context of a patient-provider interaction and generate notes instantly. Providers can simply review the AI-generated documentation, make any necessary tweaks and move on to higher-priority tasks. Plus, the quality of AI-generated documentation can improve over time with user feedback.
The impact is enormous, as shown in a recent study from the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Innovation Lab, which found that using an AI assistant reduced median documentation time by 72% per note.
But time savings are far from the only benefit of AI-powered clinical notes. Using generative AI can also bolster the accuracy and consistency of documentation — key not only to compliance and reimbursement, but also patient safety and care quality.
Perhaps most importantly, AI can free up providers to focus their attention on patients, not paperwork. As Dr. Michelle Thompson puts it in a recent piece on healthcare AI in the New York Times, “A.I. has allowed me, as a physician, to be 100 percent present for my patients.”
With these benefits in mind — and given the low lift required to get started — using generative AI to streamline admin and documentation should be a no-brainer for most providers.
But why stop there?
Overlooked: Care Quality and Clinical Support
Using generative AI to streamline admin is a great start, but I’m convinced providers should see this as only the bare minimum — the lowest-hanging fruit for AI in healthcare.
Generative AI can do so much more. AI can not only make healthcare operations and workflows more efficient, but also drive a better patient experience and help providers be more effective during visits.
For example, generative AI can serve as a copilot for providers, offering real-time feedback, reminders and resources. Providers can train an AI model in their best practices — clinical, compliance, “web-side manners,” among others — and then get in-the-moment guidance that enhances care quality and continuity.
This could not only help ensure a great patient experience, but also give providers — especially newly-onboarded providers — extra confidence in their approach. Instead of facing a “sink or swim” scenario with limited feedback, providers are empowered to continually refine their approach to align with their best practices.
Generative AI can also give providers easy access to a wealth of clinical knowledge and resources for patients.
AI can sift through vast repositories of data in seconds to offer additional context on patient medical histories, summarize previous visits or find (or even instantly generate) educational materials that best fit the context.
Such in-the-moment access to a trove of information can streamline diagnoses and shared decision-making, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
While AI may one day make accurate diagnoses or spearhead groundbreaking research all on its own, we don’t need to dive into speculative fiction to see the value of AI in the here and now. AI can make an enormous impact today in enhancing the provider-patient relationship and improving the experience on both sides of a visit.
Instead of focusing only on how AI can save them time, providers also should consider the new forms of care delivery and the levels of care quality AI makes possible. The key is using AI as a tool to empower providers, not overshadow or replace them.
Bottom Line: Think Bigger
Generative AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, and as healthcare becomes increasingly virtual — and increasingly personalized — AI will soon be impossible for providers to ignore.
AI-powered clinical notes and automating admin is a great start, but providers shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees.
Even today, generative AI can have a huge impact on everything from patient experience to care quality and provider confidence by acting as a real-time assistant, a wellspring of knowledge and a guardian of best practices.
And if that’s possible, why look the other way?
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