Here’s a look at how the five largest health systems leveraged AI in 2024, as reported by Becker’s:
Advocate Health (Charlotte, N.C.): Advocate Health continued to expand its use of Microsoft’s DAX Copilot, which ambiently records patient encounters then drafts a note for the EHR, after being the first health system to pilot the technology in 2023. Advocate expanded the AI tool to its Midwest sites in 2024 and now has more than 2,500 clinicians using it.
Neurologists at some Advocate hospitals deployed AI to determine patients’ candidacy for endovascular thrombectomy. Meanwhile, physicians at Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist employed AI to better predict and diagnose lung cancer.
Some Advocate clinical teams draft MyChart messages with AI, while others use AI to find and summarize the most important information in a patient’s chart. Advocate is also piloting Project Nursing, an AI solution from Microsoft to capture spoken observations and automatically populate nursing workflow sheets in Epic.
“One of our biggest focuses has been artificial intelligence,” Advocate Health CIO Bobbie Byrne, MD, told Becker’s. “That began with creating a robust AI governance framework that aims to be equitable, ethical, valid, reliable, transparent, accountable and impactful.”
Ascension (St. Louis): In May, Nashville, Tenn.-based Ascension Saint Thomas began utilizing egnite’s CardioCare technology, an AI-powered platform designed to enhance cardiovascular care. The platform helps physicians identify at-risk patients earlier, aiming to reduce deaths, strokes, and hospitalizations. It also facilitates timely referrals to specialists for conditions like valvular disease, atrial fibrillation, and heart failure while prioritizing life-saving treatments. Furthermore, it ensures patients with critical cardiovascular conditions receive care consistent with established medical guidelines.
By August, Ascension Saint Thomas expanded its use of AI by introducing an AI-powered administrative assistant for its second- and third-year internal medicine residents. Through this initiative, residents can leverage Suki, an AI healthcare assistant, to alleviate documentation burdens.
CommonSpirit Health (Chicago): In March, CommonSpirit unveiled its proprietary AI assistant, Insightli. This tool enables the organization to generate written content securely, eliminating the risks associated with sharing sensitive information externally. The health system has established a data governance team to support the ethical application of AI.
“CommonSpirit Health’s rapid adoption of AI tools reflects our commitment to improving operations, patient care, and employee engagement,” CommonSpirit CIO Daniel Barchi told Becker’s. “We now have over 130 AI and RPA [robotic process automation] tools in production — nearly double the number deployed this time last year — significantly enhancing our operational efficiency and patient care.”
HCA Healthcare (Nashville, Tenn.): HCA Healthcare has been using Google’s AI-powered nurse handoffs. The nurse handoff note allows providers to leverage AI to improve workflows for time-consuming clerical tasks. The tool was developed by HCA with Google’s AI and is being tested at four HCA Healthcare hospitals in Tennessee and Florida.
Additionally, during an October earnings call, HCA Healthcare CEO Sam Hazen described the organization as being at an “inflection point” with AI, highlighting the tangible benefits the health system has begun to realize. He pointed to AI’s role in optimizing staff scheduling through patient demand forecasting and workforce allocation, as well as its impact on the revenue cycle, including managing receivables and addressing claims denials.
Also in October, HCA revealed a partnership with Commure to develop and implement an ambient AI platform across its network of healthcare professionals. The collaboration has produced a multi-specialty, EHR-agnostic platform designed to enhance critical workflows in emergency departments, hospitalist operations, and ambulatory care settings.
Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, Calif.): Kaiser Permanente embarked on the largest generative AI rollout in healthcare history when it started offering Abridge’s generative AI clinical documentation tool across its footprint of 40 hospitals, 600-plus medical offices and eight states in August.
“This has been the fastest implementation of a technology in my over 20 years at Kaiser Permanente,” Desiree Gandrup-Dupre, senior vice president of care delivery technology services at Kaiser Permanente, told Becker’s in August. “The demand and interest from the clinicians has been driving us to launch this quickly and also make sure that we’re being as efficient as we could with the right amount of quality.”
The health system in April also teamed up with health tech company Innovaccer to deploy its AI platform for value-based care and reported that it could resolve a third of patient messages with AI.
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