“The applications of AI to ‘augment’ physicians may be more realistic and broader reaching than those that portend to replace existing healthcare services,” said a Health Affairs blog post co-written by American Medical Association Chief Medical Information Officer Michael Hodgkins, MD, and Shantanu Nundy, MD, director of the Human Diagnosis Project.
The two physicians described three ways AI can be used to improve physicians’ workflow while relieving and preventing burnout:
1. Point-of-care learning. AI can deliver information to physicians as clinical questions arise, personalizing the content physicians need and want to know by assessing practice data, online search queries and formal and self-completed assessments. In this way, physicians don’t have to waste time reviewing what they already know or looking through content not relevant to their practices.
2. Clinical documentation. Employing AI for clinical documentation tasks is “one of the most promising” medical applications of technology, the physicians said. Dr. Hodgkins and Nundy envision AI programs that analyze a physician’s free-text narrative, extract relevant information and put it in the appropriate structured data field.
3. Quality-measurement reporting. On average, physicians spend about 2.6 hours a week addressing quality-measure reporting, according to research cited by the two physicians. AI could replace manual data collection by reviewing clinical documents and pulling out information for quality reports.
“By freeing doctors from clinical documentation and quality measurement as well as enhancing the value of practice-based learning, AI has the potential to augment the most foundational aspect of high-quality care: the doctor-patient relationship,” the physicians wrote.
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