This week’s The Winning Edge panel set the stage for AI in clinical support, from compiling a better patient record to identifying the care gaps in population health.
Clinical care is the next big thing for AI integration, and healthcare leaders have a lot of ideas about how the technology can be used.
In this week’s The Winning Edge, sponsored by Lightbeam Health Solutions, Michael Wells, president of OSF HealthCare’s Saint Francis Medical Center in Illinois, and Ishani Ved, MHA, CPHQ, FHELA, director of transformational population health and outcomes for Saint Peter’s Healthcare System in New Jersey, explained how AI is slowly and carefully being used to help with care management.
Ved noted the benefits to population health, particularly in gathering and assessing data from disparate and siloed sources to understand the social determinants of health that are keeping underserved populations from accessing the care they need. And Wells pointed to the possibilities in improving inpatient care, from capturing conversations in the hospital room to improving the patient’s medical record, even monitoring patients when no one else is in the room.
Both said the key to using AI in clinical care is ensuring that the data used in AI programs is up to date and reliable, and that means good governance and continuous monitoring. It also means making the entire process transparent, and helping doctors and nurses understand how AI will improve their workflows and give them more time to spend with their patients.
As Danielle Bergman, MSN, APRN, FNP-BC, AVP of clinical development at Lightbeam Health, noted, AI has the opportunity to take a lot of time-consuming and administrative tasks off the provider’s “mental bandwidth” and help them focus on patient care.
Here’s the YouTube presentation of Tuesday’s webinar.
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.