The Chesterfield, Mo.-based health system has been adopting the technology for such areas as diagnostic imaging, nurse handoffs and medical visit scribing.
“AI is going to solve many of the problems that patients and providers have around access, around our capacity,” said Mercy President and CEO Steve Mackin. “We have more patients coming in and needing complex care, more patients with chronic conditions that need, quite literally, real-time support. And these types of tools allow us to engage patients in near real time and keep a better connection to their provider team.”
The $9.3 billion system recently took a big leap forward with technology. Mercy adopted a platform from Aidoc that employs AI to review and flag incidental findings in diagnostic imaging, marking the tech company’s largest implementation to date.
“We’re systematically looking at all of the opportunities where AI can really have its biggest impact. And imaging is absolutely near the top of the list,” Mr. Mackin said. “The reasons are physician challenges and shortages, No. 1, and, No. 2, tremendous growth in imaging.”
By the time Mercy finishes rolling out the technology this month, all of its imaging patients will have access to an AI second opinion. Early on in the implementation, the tech has already been identifying patients with conditions like brain bleeds to get them into treatment sooner.
Mercy has long been a player in the burgeoning healthcare AI space. The health system instituted its first AI software 11 years ago as part of its virtual nursing program and now has over 200 models up and running.
“We went through the deliberate process to make sure our data went into an intelligent data platform that we put in the cloud,” Mr. Mackin explained. “And by doing that, it allows us now to bring in AI solutions to run against that data and connect it to the patients we’re serving.”
That includes for areas such as nurse handoffs but also oncology, cardiology and diabetes care.
Mercy also has a deep relationship with Microsoft, using its DAX Copilot for ambient listening during medical visits and testing it out for nurses. That technology has allowed Mercy physicians to, on average, see one extra patient a day and eliminated human scribes in emergency departments.
The health system measures AI success through physician satisfaction, engagement and productivity. DAX, for instance, has helped reduce the number of physicians who say they feel burnt out by 60%. Also for consumers, Mr. Mackin said: “Are they receiving care faster, more effectively, and are we diagnosing their situation more rapidly in near real time and getting them to the optimal solution more effectively?”
There are also cost savings from being more clinically and financially efficient. Mr. Mackin said the big upfront investment was creating a “digital infrastructure” that enables quick adoption of AI solutions, helped by the fact that Mercy is on a single instance of Epic’s EHR.
“This is going to allow us to provide proactive and predictive care, and it’s also going to help us solve some of the fundamental headwinds we have in healthcare around labor, access, total cost of care,” Mr. Mackin said. “This is actually going to help us, over time, bend the cost curve and solve some of those bigger challenges.”
