Health systems are turning to technology to provide vital support to their own staff. Some ways they are doing this is by harnessing the power of AI-driven administrative assistance to rid clinicians of documentation burdens — an issue that has cost the healthcare industry $1 trillion annually.
For instance, Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health clinicians are using Dax, an app from software company Nuance, to generate clinical notes and save staff time on charting.
The technology uses artificial intelligence to generate a clinician summary of their interactions with patients and then uploads it to the EHR.
Before examinations, Baptist clinicians ask patients if their conversations can be recorded.
“There’s new economies of scale … that healthcare will be able to get into [by] leveraging AI,” Baptist CIO and Chief Digital Officer Aaron Miri told CNBC in a story published Aug. 7. “You eliminate all the administrative redundancy, and bureaucracy overhead, and you allow folks to work at top of license.”
Another way hospitals and health systems are looking to alleviate documentation burdens — which 57 percent percent of providers said is one of the contributing factors leading to burnout — is by using AI within the EHR.
UC San Diego Health; Madison, Wis.-based UW Health; Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care; and Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health are currently piloting a new integration from EHR vendor Epic Systems that uses Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service with Epic’s EHR software.
The pilot uses Microsoft’s AI to automatically draft message responses so providers don’t have to do it manually.
“The feedback from our clinicians who are piloting this effort is that the message drafts are generally helpful, especially for some of the more routine responses like work excuses and medication refills,” David McSwain, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Chapel Hill, N.C.-based UNC Health, told Becker’s. “We are working specifically with Epic on how to ensure that our clinicians engage with the message and how to draw their attention to the parts of the draft where the AI isn’t best equipped to answer.”
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