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 pays 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.Â
Dr. Trachella Johnson
CNBC
The app frees doctors from having to type up notes during patient visits, and from having to complete them up at night. A practice so common doctors have a nickname for it.
“Pajama time — which must be the time where you are on the brink of wind down and go to bed. We’re normally still charting and noting and doing things which might be going to boost the lifetime of the patient but not necessarily our own quality of life,” Foy said.
The price of tackling burnout
Harnessing AI programs to place 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 give you the chance 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, in response to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.Â
The researchers estimate adopting AI to simplify those tasks could help hospitals cut their total costs by 5% to 11% in the following five years, while physician groups could achieve as much as 8% savings, and health insurers as much as 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 more likely to have the tech staffing to assist integrate the brand new generative A.I. solutions.
“If it cost me X, but I just made my patients an entire lot happier and my physicians an entire lot more productive? Well, there’s a solution right there by itself,” said Miri.
Keeping people in the combo
Straight away, hospital systems working with the brand new generative AI programs to automate administrative tasks are requiring doctors and nurses to envision over the automated documents before they’re included in medical records.
“What organizations are doing is that they’re taking a look at these high-impact use cases, but in addition ensuring that they mitigate the risks and looking out at ways in which we are able to 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 chop costs and boost efficiency, automation could take humans out of the combo.
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 affect patient access to care.
“My deepest fear is that medical data is utilized in a pernicious way, either to dam access to the suitable healthcare, or to distort the way in which 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 using conventional computer algorithms to disclaim medical claims.
“Generative AI should open doors for access, it should provide pathways for providing equitable care which have not existed prior 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 necessary for us as a society to embrace the responsible AI principles of having the ability to move forward… in order that the nice actors are defining the long run and never allowing the bad actors to potentially define that,” said Rhew.
