I have not devoted my career to medicine to manage documents – and scribes AI will not solve this
Imagine this. The patient in front of me had just undergone a long and complicated hospitalization for congestive heart failure. But she did not understand what had happened to her or why she was taking so many new drugs. As an electrophysiologist specializing in heart rate disorders, I was equipped to manage arrhythmia, but not in the complex world of heart failure management that a general cardiologist would sail easily. To worsen things, his medical records were not found, and my afternoon clinic was already running an hour late.
This frustrating scenario had become far too common. Although I specialize in the treatment of arrhythmias, my clinical slots were regularly taken by patients with primary problems outside of my expertise. To make matters worse, very few patients came with the medical records I needed to provide high quality clinical consultations. Our entire team was doing their best, but our back office staff were exceeded, and we had far too few general cardiologists to manage the volume of patients needing their expertise.
We have attenuated many of these challenges in the pre-ai era by hiring additional clinicians and staff. But this approach had significant drawbacks. He added considerable general costs to the clinic and forced them to do pure administrative work. If it was essential to expand our capacity for cardiology and general electrophysiology care by hiring more clinicians, we have not been able to unload their load of administrative tasks or increase the efficiency of their clinical visits.
These problems are emblematic of American health care challenges. Administrative activities represent a third of total health costs and constitute a major contributor to the professional exhaustion of clinicians. The vast majority of administrative tasks come from areas such as the examination of graphics, management activities for the use of health insurance and office tasks. I finish these tasks because my patients depend on them and that no one else will do so, but each form that I fill out reminds me that I did not spend sixteen years in training after high school to manage the documents.
The professional exhaustion of doctors is not only a reflection of overworked doctors who need a little more vacation. This type of professional exhaustion drives patients directly to patients. Doctors suffering from professional exhaustion have more than twice the chances of self -depressed medical errors, and professional exhaustion is associated with chances of 2 times higher for dangerous care, non -professional behavior and low satisfaction of patients. In addition, burnt doctors spend less time with patients and are more likely to leave practice, which reduces access to care. Unless we create a more productive and sustainable working environment for doctors and other clinicians, the years dedicated to medical training are wasted, to the detriment of patients and their access to care.
There was great optimism as to the role of AI in the transformation of health care for the benefit of patients, clinicians and society. The first demonstration was an explosion of Scribe AI products. However, despite their impressive financing cycles and their growing adoption, they only tackle the invisible notes which, in reality, is a fraction of the challenge of health care workflow.
Scribe products have excellent to capture meeting stories and convert the words spoken into structured notes, but they operate in isolation of the broader ecosystem of context and information.
The reality is that the documentation represents only one piece of a much larger administrative puzzle which prevents clinicians from spending significant time with patients.
What clinicians really need today is a complete support for unloading routine tasks.
They need intelligent systems that can proactively highlight the history of the relevant patient before appointments, reporting gaps and automatically make the queue of appropriate screening reminders or preventive care protocols.
They need tools that can manage the administrative orchestration of references, previous authorizations and insurance checks without constant manual intervention.
And they need a technology that can manage the asynchronous communication burden – triacing patient messages, coordinate with care teams and guarantee that critical results do not fall through the meshes of the net.
The objective is not only to unload the burden of documentation; It is a question of freeing clinicians to focus on clinical decision-making, relationships with patients and resolution of complex problems, leaving AI technology to manage routine and repetitive tasks that currently fragment their attention and prolong their work days far beyond clinical hours.
The solution to hire more staff is not sustainable for clinics and health systems in the United States faced with federal funding reductions, hiring challenges and questions about the possibility of keeping their doors open. These systematic challenges and these dysfunctions become even more urgent when considered in the context of the American population who ages quickly and the climbing of health care demands. By 2030, 1 in 6 people worldwide will be 60 years old or over, many of whom require more care than to any other moment in their lives. This collision course between professional exhaustion and demand is not durable. Something must give, and it is generally the quality of care or the career of our doctors. Without fundamental change, we build a health system that does not work for anyone. Not submerged doctors, not poorly served patients, and certainly not the families who are on both.
AI has enormous potential to improve certain parts of our work, but we must not be satisfied with this. American Healthcare needs transformer AI technology to improve the efficiency, access and experience of patients, and allow clinicians to do the type of work they have formed to do.
Our path to go lies in the use of AI and emerging technologies to build the health system that we desperately need: the one who can better serve each patient, without burning each doctor. For the first time, we have the possibility of considerably expanding access to care while improving prevention and treatment based on evidence for individual patients and improving the use of the expertise of clinicians.
Photo: Lerbank, Getty Images
Dr. Eric Stecker is co-founder and chief doctor at Insight Health, cardiologist and professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. He also chairs the American College of Cardiology Science and Quality Committee, which is responsible for the national guidelines for cardiology practice and other clinical policy documents. It maintains a practice which focuses on advanced ablation and implantation of the device. He received a BS and MD in the program of medical researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He received an MPH by emphasizing the management of health and policy of the University of Michigan.
This message appears through the Medcity influencers program. Anyone can publish their point of view on business and innovation in health care on Medcity News through Medcity influencers. Click here to find out how.
