Readers Write: AI is Here to Stay, So Don’t Miss Out on the Opportunity

AI is Here to Stay, So Don’t Miss Out on the Opportunity
By Greg Miller

Greg Miller is VP of business development at Carta Healthcare.

AI is going to take all of our jobs. At least that’s the impression one would get today from far too many media outlets. Alas, blatant scare-mongering works and generates advertising revenue.

We’ve talked recently with dozens of health system technology decision-makers who acknowledge that artificial intelligence (AI) can make their organizations more efficient and cost-effective. Yet some worry that AI will replace their employees. This isn’t just another concern; it’s the top concern that we’ve been hearing.

The prospect of losing valued employees to technology is one kind of AI-related anxiety among healthcare professionals. There’s also fear of missing out (FOMO). Healthcare IT pros are under heavy pressure from leadership to do something with AI or risk being left behind. However, these healthcare veterans have heard it all before about why they must implement a certain technology to keep up with competitors or face imminent doom. No wonder many have become immune to marketing hype.

Whether you’re in the fear of AI or FOMO camp, AI is happening with or without you. Provider organizations that fail to implement an effective AI strategy will struggle as their understaffed workforces become deeply buried under a backlog of clinical administrative tasks. As more healthcare data is generated and jobs go unfilled, healthcare organizations that lack AI capabilities won’t be able to keep up with clinical documentation.

But while many provider organization leaders fear that AI will replace humans, healthcare workers are more likely to welcome the assistance that AI can provide. In a survey from earlier this year, 77% of responding healthcare workers said that emerging technologies like AI could be useful in combating the healthcare staffing shortage.

AI implementations can optimize the return on investment for hospitals and health systems while providing a blueprint for future successful AI initiatives. There are pragmatic and safe ways for provider organizations to apply AI today that are affordable and designed to ease the administrative burden for clinicians.

One good example is using ambient listening to perform clinical documentation tasks. Physicians typically spend between 30 and 90 minutes at home completing clinical administrative work that they couldn’t finish during office hours. Ambient listening functionality can perform these essential clinical documentation tasks, improving efficiency and accuracy while vastly reducing clinician workloads and burnout.

Another strong use case for AI in healthcare is abstracting data from electronic health records (EHRs). On average, it takes an abstractor one hour to finish abstraction work for a single case. That’s a lot of costly time. In contrast, the right AI technology can perform abstractions for thousands of cases in minutes. Can a hospital or health system afford to pass up this opportunity?

It’s important to know where AI fits into your provider organization. AI is a tool and part of a process. It’s also familiar since we use AI every day in our regular lives through computers, smartphones, and other connected devices.

AI is going to help clinicians do more with the time they have. It will help physicians, nurses, coders, and clinical data abstractors by automating simple but necessary tasks. It will also help provider organizations improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance care quality. What AI will not do is replace medical professionals.

The already disruptive shortage of physicians and nurses in the US is expected to get worse as the nation’s population ages and our need for care services increases. Hospitals and health systems should embrace the opportunity to use AI in ways that enable their clinical staff to optimize their care for patients.