The Silent Transformation of Healthcare Record-Keeping
As recently as two or three years ago, patients going to see their doctor, dentists, or medical specialist might have been pleasantly surprised to notice the use of even a single tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
A March 2022 report from the Brookings Institution noted that the adoption of AI in healthcare seemed to be lagging well behind its application in other fields, with just 0.05% of healthcare job postings required AI-related skills.
Today, just over two years later, those rates may not have changed very much, but the medical landscape feels very different, with AI-powered solutions rapidly becoming an integral part of many medical practices.
That same patient visiting that same practice today might, in fact, be surprised if their provider wasn’t using at least some tools. Patients once accustomed to competing with a computer screen for their doctor’s attention now understand that dictation and record-keeping technologies have advanced so quickly that there is little reason for the doctor to be doing anything other than paying close attention to their conversation.
AI’s Promise: Enhancing Efficiency and Patient Care
Relieving the Burden on Healthcare Providers
Indeed, the favorable impact of AI on the economics of healthcare practices was already clear two years ago. A report in the journal Healthcare, published at the National Library of Medicine, drew a clear line connecting savings of time to savings of money.
That report noted that “… massive data collection is made available for AI-enabled algorithms that can examine pattern-based outcomes, leading to improved time analysis for decision making. Healthcare professionals are beginning to move toward AI-based solutions for predicting outcomes which can help in optimal medications based on patient profiles, thereby lowering long-term costs…”
AI solutions are present at many practices, often in the background and often even when staff do not realize they are there. But AI is also increasingly present in the patient encounter, where AI-powered medical scribes offer the most obvious and immediate evidence of how emerging technologies — including natural language algorithms and ambient listening technology — are making life easier and better for everyone involved.
Better Care Through Better Documentation
Rather than rely upon human scribes or scribe services, both of which are subject to significant error rates and high costs, many medical practices are adopting AI medical scribes to give providers a head start on their daily documentation.
Such solutions promote more in-depth, meaningful visits since providers are no longer focused on the computer keyboard but are free to have a face-to-face conversation with each patient while the software accurately records all clinical details of the encounter. And the best solutions do even more, creating draft Progress Notes that help providers with decision-making and personalized care plans.
The Technology Behind AI Medical Charting
Powering Intelligent Documentation
Anyone who does even some casual research into how AI-powered software solutions work will soon run into two terms — natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). These, along with advanced algorithms, form the core of any AI solution. And while volumes can — and have — been written about the technical details of NLP, ML, and an entire pantry-full of alphabet soup acronyms, most users need only know that such technologies work.
“Brushing aside the hype,” writes Panos Louridas in the MIT Essential Knowledge Series volume Algorithms, “most scientists working on deep learning do not ascribe to the view that deep learning systems work like the human mind. The goal is to exhibit some useful behavior, which we often associate with intelligence.”
Seamless Integration: AI and Electronic Health Records
The key phrase in that passage? “Some useful behavior.” While AI solutions are not quite human — and may never be — they long ago met that standard for usefulness.
Today, medical practices are saving hundreds of hours a year in documentation time with AI. They are putting that time to use to provide better care, clear out paperwork backlogs, engage in staff training, serve more patients, and even reduce the risks of burnout by allowing medical providers and staff to complete each day’s work on time, get home, and pay as much attention to their own physical and mental well-being as they do to that of their patients.
Implementing AI in Healthcare: From Consultation Room to Specialized Care
Beyond General Practice
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of AI in healthcare is its broad applicability. Simply put, there is no medical discipline that cannot take advantage of AI tools to at least some degree. All medical providers, from family practice to pathologists, orthopedists, dentists, surgeons, and more, can make use of these technologies.
And in some fields, such as radiology, AI appears poised to amplify the scope and accuracy of the field, as noted in this 2018 paper, “Artificial Intelligence in Radiology,” published in Nature Reviews Cancer.
“Deep learning algorithms scale with data,” the report notes. “That is, as more data are generated every day and with ongoing research efforts, we expect to see relative improvements in performance.”
Enhancing Accuracy and Efficiency
Taking Action: Embracing AI for Medical Documentation
