Joel Klein, MD, senior vice president and CIO of University of Maryland Medical System, joined the Becker's Healthcare Podcast to share his key priorities in the coming year and discuss the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare.
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Below is an excerpt from the podcast.
Question: What do you expect from AI over the next five years?
Dr. Joel Klein: That is a really exciting area, and not just in the obvious ways to predict who is going to be readmitted, or who will get sepsis, or who is going to incur the most healthcare dollar costs. We actually have implemented using our own team and tools on all of those fronts. But there are other areas, like responding to insurance denials, or help desk, where AI is beneficial. We have a bot now that handles almost all of our password resets which gets people turned around and productive again without having to wait a few minutes on the phone for a human being to reset their password. We think there is a ton of opportunity just in plain old boring business activity where AI can really help us.
I think that for me the most important thing is to remember that for areas like automatically reading the chest X-ray or the path slide, the most important thing is to have good processes around it. If I predict the five patients who are on a medsurg floor who have sepsis that nobody has identified yet, it won't do anybody any good if there isn't someone whose job it is to act on that. We can have all the fancy AI in the world, but we have to have humans who are seeing it and making sense of it, and doing something meaningful with the recommendations or directions that the algorithm or process recommends. It can't just be put this thing in, admire it and pat ourselves on the back for being fancy. It has to be ingrained back into the workflow. That is the thing we are going to focus on the most in the next year.