El Camino Health has a particular vantage point on what technology adoption can look like. The Mountain View, Calif.-based system sits in Silicon Valley, draws patients from the region’s technology industry.
Over the last year, El Camino has moved from selectively deploying AI tools to what CIO Deb Muro, calls ‘AI-powered’ — activating every available feature in its EHR, building generative AI capabilities on top of clinical and operational data, and pushing those tools across the organization. EHR-based AI use climbed 500% in just the last two months.
“We are really thinking of ourselves as AI-powered,” Ms. Muro said in a “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” interview. “We’re really trying to make sure that in every scenario, every nook and cranny of our organization, our employees, our patients, our physicians all have access to technology such as AI that’s going to help them become more efficient, more effective, and make their day better.”
On the clinical side, the push has touched several areas over the past year. El Camino implemented ambient listening in physician encounters, freeing physicians from documenting during patient visits — a change Ms. Muro said was life-changing for clinicians. The system is now expanding the capability to inpatient settings for nurses and other clinical staff.
AI has also been incorporated into radiology workflows, where the system uses it not just to analyze the presenting condition but to flag incidental findings — abnormalities unrelated to the original reason for imaging. Over a three-month period, the approach identified 700 patients with incidental findings the system was then able to treat. In the operating room, predictive modeling has been used to anticipate scheduling gaps and match them with surgical capacity in advance. Ms. Muro said OR optimization generated a couple million dollars in additional revenue the past year.
The 500% jump in EMR AI use reflects a deliberate choice to move broadly rather than selectively. While most health systems remain in piloting mode and have yet to scale AI tools across departments, El Camino has taken a different approach: activating the full range of AI features available in its EMR and measuring results from there.
“We are very much implementing everything that’s available in our EMR so that we can try it out, we can use it, we can benefit from it,”Ms. Muro said. “We’ve increased our adoption, our use of AI. And just the last couple of months within the EMR, we’ve increased it by 500%.”
On the administrative side, El Camino has deployed Copilot and Claude to staff, alongside a training initiative built around imagination — asking employees to envision what AI could change about how they work.
The future state she is building toward moves further still. Ms. Muro envisions moving away from static dashboards and point-in-time analytics toward generative AI-powered data environments where employees, physicians and patients can query information in real time.
“How do we pull data into an area where generative AI can sit on top of it and our employees and our physicians and patients can prompt on this data and get the answer that they need immediately, kind of using the AI as a sort of a concierge type of capability?” she said.
Underlying the deployment strategy is a shift in how Ms. Muro defines IT success. Her team now evaluates technology not by whether it went live but by whether people are using it and what it is delivering.
“In the old days of IT, we just really celebrated when we implemented technology, and now we’re realizing that’s not enough,” she said. “It’s adoption that is really the critical piece now that we measure ourselves against.”
That standard applies to AI in particular, where demonstrating a return on investment has proven difficult across the industry. Ms. Muro said she has directed her teams to move beyond the general claim that AI saves time and track hard-dollar metrics instead. At El Camino, that has meant documenting the revenue tied to treating incidental findings, measuring the billing acceleration that comes when physicians close charts faster and calculating the OR revenue attributable to AI-driven scheduling.
“AI is expensive,” she said. “And so as we’re thinking about bringing AI in, on the flip side, we have to think about how does it save dollars, save cost so that we can fund it.”
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