USING AI FOR RX
New technology comes to the doctor’s office, Pennsylvania hospitals
Artificial intelligence is making its way into medical offices throughout Pennsylvania, with the tantalizing promise of fewer administrative headaches for doctors and better care for patients.
The transition could be bumpy: Among obstacles to widespread adoption of tech that instantly taps vast stores of information will be doctors’ resistance to change how they’ve practiced medicine, experts say.
For patients, the selling point could be more eye contact and better communication during office visits, if doctors aren’t tied up with a computer screen, typing notes into a medical record. But that’s just the start. Google, Microsoft and Nvidia are among the tech giants plowing money into medicine. For the 12 months ending July 30, 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved 171 AI or machine learning devices for use in medicine, a number that was expected to increase 30% for the year compared to 2022.
Nearly 700 AI-like devices have been approved by the FDA since 1995.
Up for grabs is a market expected to reach $51.3 billion by 2030 from just $2.9 billion in 2022, according to India-based market research firm Insights 10.
With patients’ permission, AI software will “listen” to the physician-patient conversation in the office, then organize the notes into the written medical record. The doctor’s role will be reduced to simply editing the software’s notes for final entry.
And other, more ambitious, ways to tap the capabilities of artificial intelligence will find their way into the health care workforce soon.
Google’s Vertex AI Search and Sidekick software can, for instance, draft letters to health insurers on behalf of patients who need specialty medications, medical equipment or other care that’s not standard in their insurance benefits. The program will be “trained” on internal data rather than publicly available information sources, like ChatGPT and similar tools.
Ford, Seagate, Wayfair and Lowe’s are among other corporate users of Vertex AI, a cloud-based platform Google developed in 2021, according to San Francisco online newspaper TechCrunch. Mayo Clinic and HCA Healthcare, which operates more than 2,000 hospitals in the U.S. and Britain, are also Google AI customers. Nuance’s DAX Copilot ambient listening software is used to organize and write patient exam narratives for medical records.
Microsoft acquired Nuance for $19.7 billion in 2021. Microsoft is also a major investor in OpenAI, the forprofit arm of the San Francisco company founded in 2021 that created all the buzz a year later around generative AI models like ChatGPT.
What AI can do
Throughout the U.S., the industry is going big
for artificial intelligence, with academic medical centers tapping AI’s vast reserves of information to do things like better identify pre-diabetes, perform retinal exams for early signs of disease and detect an array of cancers as well or better than humans.
Tasks that artificial intelligence tools could pick up include writing patient progress notes, responding to emailed questions from patients and suggesting medical coding, which is the basis of billing.
A 2023 survey by the American Medical Association found that 65% of more than 1,000 doctors surveyed saw advantages to what the medical organization called “augmented intelligence.” But doctors also worried about data privacy issues and legal liability for AI-generated medical errors.