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One hospital’s AI journey |
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| When I first met Nishit Patel, chief medical informatics officer of Tampa General Hospital, about a year and a half ago, the hospital system was just starting to roll out an AI scribe to help its doctors and nurses document visits with patients. |
| That was the beginning of Tampa General’s AI journey, which Patel described as “aggressive” but “intentional.” Today, an AI scribe is being used for a quarter of all the health system’s patient encounters, Patel told me recently. It tapped AI for revenue-cycle tasks. Now, it’s using the technology to make sense of all the information in a patient's health record. |
| “We face this challenge where there are these incredible insights that are hidden away in a bunch of notes within a record over a lifetime that you have with the patient,” Patel said. “How do you let our physicians, our nurses and others extract that information quickly, efficiently in a real-world setting?” |
| This year, AI doctors have stolen all the headlines. It’s the first time we’ve seen digital health companies allowing AI to provide clinical care to patients without a doctor in the loop. But Tampa General’s latest rollout reminded me that there’s still so much opportunity for AI not to replace, but to assist, doctors in providing better care. (Of course, lots of AI tools
coming to market also help providers bill more for visits, to the detriment of our premiums!) |
| Tampa General previously deployed tools that summarize a record with key points about what happened to a patient over the last 24 hours, or since their last annual visit. In the past few weeks, it became the first health system to roll out an Epic tool, called Ask Art, that allows clinicians to ask questions of a patient’s record similar to how they'd interact with ChatGPT. |
| A doctor might ask about the patient’s dermatology history, or whether a patient has ever been on a certain medication, for example. The answer would be surfaced faster than a doctor could find it hunting through the record, and it helps alleviate the risk of missing important, buried information, Patel said. |
| Patel, a dermatologist, said he thinks this is the greatest time to be in healthcare because these new AI tools can fix problems that have plagued the industry for ages. Before, the only solution was to throw more people at a problem. A worsening provider shortage and an aging population with more healthcare needs will only strain systems further. |
| “These tools [provide] the potential to scale this workforce in a way that we couldn't have otherwise, and at the same time address some of those perennial issues of burnout and that complexity issue in a way that makes care safer, better, more enjoyable.” |
| - Shelby |
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Kicking off ACCESS |
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150 |
More than 150 companies signed up to participate in ACCESS, the new federal experiment that tests tech-enabled care for Medicare enrollees with chronic health conditions, according to CMS. Some participants that caught our eye include Devoted Medical, Doctronic, Headspace, Jimini, Noom, Slingshot
AI and Whoop. The program kicks off July 5. |
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