The Arizona-based health system is rolling out to all 33 hospitals across 6 states a new tool designed to help clinicians ease their documentation burden
One of the nation’s largest health systems is scaling an AI tool across the enterprise in hopes of giving doctors more time in front of their patients.
Arizona-based Banner Health is giving clinicians in all 33 of its hospitals across six states access to a tool within the EHR that summarizes clinical notes. The technology, developed by Regard, is designed to reduce the clinician’s time spent in front of a computer and facilitate easier access to decision support for care management.
The project is indicative of a trend in healthcare, with health systems and hospitals across the country putting AI to work handling back-end and administrative tasks that otherwise would be done by doctors or nurses. Industry leaders see these projects as “low-hanging fruit” that prove AI’s value and offer immediate ROI.
“We are looking for multiple ways to take tasks away from clinicians and replace that with time they have in front of the bedside,” says Susan Lee, DO, MBA, CP, the health system’s Physician Executive for Hospital Based Medicine. “We want to be AI-enabled.”
“The more that we can envision these tools as enhancers and not replacers, I think organizations will successfully adopt them,” she adds.
Lee says the health system, which tested the tool at Banner Thunderbird Medical Center in 2022, took the unusual step of asking that each clinician be trained one-on-one, rather than via video or in a classroom. The idea is to personalize the clinician’s use of AI and make it more meaningful.
“I think for this tool, the ability to impact such a broad swath of clinical care in a meaningful way made us want to pursue the more personal route,” she says.
This also helps with buy-in, as clinicians come to understand that AI can augment their workflows rather than replacing them. Lee points out that clinicians need to select the tool in the EHR, review the summary, and act on it.
“There’s also a human at the end of the AI loop,” she says. “The physician is still making all the clinical decisions. This tool is helping the physician sort through information in a more rapid way and is also sorting through a very large portfolio of information that the physician could manually sort though, [but] it just does it a lot faster.”
Whether the tool actually improves documentation or care management remains to be seen. Lee says the health system will at first keep tabs on how many clinicians are using it and how often. They’ll also look at whether the tool captures all the information a doctor needs and whether that summary is accurate.
It’s also important to see how this tool evolves. As with any AI technology, the platform becomes more sophisticated as more data is introduced. Lee says Banner Health’s clinicians have been and will continue to offer feedback on the tool, giving Regard more insight into what works for clinicians and what doesn’t. That feedback should help in how the technology evolves, while also giving clinicians the confidence to use a tool they they had a hand in developing.
“Banner is looking to be a front-runner in many of these scenarios,” Lee says of the opportunity to influence a tool’s development. “We do want to be influencers. I think everybody should try playing with it.”
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Banner Health is partnering with Regard to roll out the latter’s AI tool across the enterprise, giving clinicians access to the technology through their EHR.
The technology is designed to capture and summarize clinical notes, enabling clinicians to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in front of patients.
The health system is asking that each clinician receive one-on-one training, so that they’re more comfortable with the technology and will be more likely to use it.