Hospital execs on how AI improves patient care
TENNESSEE, UNITED STATES — Healthcare industry executives acknowledged at the ViVE 2024 conference last month how artificial intelligence (AI) has helped them improve healthcare delivery in various ways, from administrative tasks to identifying new cancers.
Chris Waugh, chief design and innovation officer of Sutter Health, shared that their radiologists have partnered with the healthcare AI platform Ferrum Health which yielded life-saving discoveries.
“We are catching cancers that we wouldn’t have caught before. But had we not done that in lockstep with our radiology department, it could have been a complete mess,” Waugh said, per MedCityNews.
He also noted that working with Ferrum Health early in the process was imperative. Additionally, Sutter has centralized some functions, such as medication management and virtual care, to alleviate worker burden.
Rebecca Kaul, chief of innovation and transformation at Northwell Health, echoed Waugh’s sentiments saying, “You are helping them be accountable by offering up different ways to solve the problem and partnering with them to solve the problem.”
Kaul added that AI can also help medical organizations improve patient care by reducing the burden of administrative tasks.
“We can now understand when someone comes to us with a text-based chatbot request. We used to not be able to parse out the intent whether they wanted to book or rebook an appointment or they wanted to pay a bill or refill a prescription,” Kaul said.
Along with AI services, medical organizations have been availing the services of outsourcing firms that provide other back-office functions such as accounting, information technology, and billing.
