Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health said about 75% of its radiologists actively use Smart Impression, a Microsoft generative AI tool that drafts radiology report impressions, as the health system moves its imaging sites to Microsoft’s PowerScribe One reporting platform.
Most of Intermountain’s radiology enterprise has had access to the tool for about six months, and some subspecialties use it even more, according to an Oct. 12 Microsoft customer story. Smart Impression runs inside PowerScribe and produces draft impressions that radiologists review and finalize.
Kenneth Nowers, MD, medical director of imaging operations at Intermountain, said rising imaging volumes, staffing shortages and higher quality expectations are driving the push. Dr. Nowers said the tool “really decreases cognitive burden of these tasks, and it improves the report quality.”
Radiologists tend to distrust AI, and Dr. Nowers said one of the clearest signs of success was the lack of complaints after deployment.
Intermountain’s sites are at different stages of PowerScribe One adoption. One of them is Steinberg Diagnostic Medical Imaging, a recently acquired outpatient imaging provider with 12 locations in Southern Nevada, which moved to PowerScribe One from the older PowerScribe 360.
The health system expects the migration to bring cloud-based speech recognition, expanded medical dictionaries and a more consistent reporting experience across sites. Intermountain is also looking at Dragon Copilot for radiology. Dr. Nowers identified prior report summarization as the feature likely to have the most immediate impact for radiologists.
Intermountain already uses Dragon Copilot for physician documentation during patient encounters.
