Artificial intelligence emerging as essential in healthcare
When it comes to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, practices face both an opportunity and a challenge.
The opportunity is clear: AI’s remarkable abilities to gather and organize information can save organizations enormous amounts of time and effort. Once seen as a specialized set of tools with limited applications, AI is now seen as an essential component for all practices.
healow is leading the way by implementing AI into every aspect of healthcare IT products and services. This democratization — AI for everyone — promises to address three core challenges: Staffing shortages, documentation burdens, and high rates of no-shows.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by augmenting diagnostic accuracy through advanced image analysis, clinical decision support at the point of care as actionable insights and predictive modeling,” notes a July 2024 article in The Lancet: Regional Health, Europe. “By automating routine tasks, AI enables healthcare professionals to focus more on complex patient care and decision-making.”
Front-office staff can employ AI to reallocate valuable hours from answering phones to helping patients. Providers can get back to the art of medicine, using the work of AI tools to set the stage for achieving deeper insights into their patients and developing effective treatment plans more quickly than in the past. Anticipating and preventing no-shows can help practices capture thousands of dollars in additional revenue each year.
A positive outlook, but important caveats remain
A survey of 385 healthcare providers at the 2024 eClinicalWorks® and healow® National Conference found that 90% have a positive or very positive view of AI’s existing and potential applications in healthcare.
But challenges remain. Not all AI products are created equal. Some still produce hallucinations — incorrect or misleading results in response to prompts. Some AI-powered solutions may be so cumbersome that they discourage would-be users from implementing them. Others might be implemented but prove so difficult to use that providers either fail to take full advantage of what they can do or simply stick with time-tested (and time-consuming) workflows and habits.
“Concerns about adapting to new technology, job security, and the ethical implications of AI use can also contribute to stress and exacerbate burnout among healthcare workers,” the Lancet article continues. “Therefore, quality education, early engagement of health workers in the design of Digital Health Technologies and thoughtful implementation of AI in healthcare is key.”
Put simply: AI can be very helpful in healthcare, provided it’s done right.
The evidence is in: AI is needed now more than ever
There is no longer any doubt that AI has a critical role to play in modern healthcare. A study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, summarized in an April 2023 American Medical Association post, noted that:
- 3% of the more than 43,000 healthcare professionals surveyed reported feeling burned out.
- 3% of physicians stated they intended to quit their jobs within two years.
- Healthcare workers reporting excessive workloads had between 2.2 times and 2.9 times greater risk of burnout than did colleagues with manageable workloads.
Our survey of attendees at our 2024 National Conference offers further evidence of the extraordinary stresses that today’s healthcare practices are under:
- 62% of practices are spending four or more hours each day on phone calls and managing appointments, taking front-office staff away from other duties.
- 55% of practices have 10 or more no-shows a week — amounting to 500 or more no-shows each year and the loss of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
- Nearly 60% of practices spend five or more hours weekly on clinical documentation, with providers struggling to maintain eye contact during patient encounters.
- More than half of practices receive 100+ faxes each week, including long, complex documents that require extensive analysis.
- More than one-third of practices need 1-2 days to obtain records from outside sources, slowing their ability to develop a complete picture of a given patient’s health.
NC24 spotlights a lineup of AI-powered tools
For eClinicalWorks and healow, AI is nothing new. Last year saw the introduction of Sunoh.ai, an ambient-listening solution for clinical documentation that has now been adopted by more than 60,000 providers nationwide and is saving them hours each day.
- The healow Image AI solution is helping practices clean out those fax inboxes and develop deeper insight more quickly.
- AI for PRISMA is fulfilling the promises of interoperability by speeding the collection of records from outside sources.
- AI for RCM is providing billers with better ways to assess their practices’ financial health, collect payments more efficiently, and produce reports that point the way to other improvements.
- Improvements throughout the core eClinicalWorks EHR are making workflows more efficient in dozens of ways.
But the star of this year’s National Conference was healow Genie, the AI-powered contact center solution that is slated for release in March 2025.
healow Genie is a comprehensive, AI-powered contact center solution that connects patients to the information and assistance they need 24/7/365. Genie is designed to close the gaps between the promises and practice of AI by reducing the burden on front-office medical staff, improving compliance, extending care throughout the day, and helping reduce practices’ overall operational costs.
Much more than a contact center
While Genie is considered a contact center solution, it goes far beyond what traditional call centers do. By combining the best elements of AI and the talents that only humans possess, Genie offers a sophisticated, multimodal approach to engaging patients.
Each of the four modes serves a specific purpose:
AI Agent lets patients use voice calls, texts, chat, or chatbots to get quick answers to common questions, including hours, locations, and balances, manage their appointments, or submit referral and medication refill requests.
Intelligent Assistant escalates more complex questions to a human agent who can help answer them or connect the patient to a provider. Genie also helps by making data, records, and resources available to those agents.
Automated After-Hours Service fields patients’ after-hours calls, routes them to on-call providers, and creates summaries and transcripts of those calls so that primary care doctors have the information they need for follow-up care.
Conversational Smart Campaigns generate outgoing calls and campaigns, allowing practices to reach individual patients or groups, such as those who miss wellness visits or may need routine screenings — which can mean higher compliance and better medical outcomes.
And Genie incorporates the healow AI-powered no-show prediction model, which in just one year has led to 187,000+ medical visits that might otherwise have been no-shows — marking a serious loss of both revenue and patients’ access to healthcare.
Seeking a 75% reduction in documentation
Coincidentally, healow Genie is making its debut in 2025, which happens to be the date that former U.S. surgeon general Dr. Vivek H. Murthy set as the target for medical providers to achieve a 75% reduction in the burden of their clinical documentation.
In a July 2022 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Murthy discussed elements of his May 2022 advisory on health worker burnout, including the need to reduce “administrative burdens that stand between health workers and their patients and communities.”
Dr. Murthy wrote: “One study found that in addition to spending 1 to 2 hours each night doing administrative work, outpatient physicians spend nearly 2 hours on the electronic health record and desk work during the day for every 1 hour spent with patients — a trend widely lamented by clinicians and patients alike.”
Our nation’s healthcare organizations continue to face serious challenges — including a shortage of healthcare workers and ever larger numbers of older patients with chronic conditions. We have little choice but to embrace the promises of the AI Age of Intelligence — including solutions such as healow Genie — to help meet those challenges.
To learn more about healow Genie, click here.