Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new technology, but the pace of AI innovation and adoption in our everyday life has accelerated dramatically in the last two years. Discussions of the power and promise of AI are now common in healthcare and will only grow as new capabilities like generative AI emerge. Some healthcare stakeholders are eager to embrace the potential cost-savings and efficiency improvements that AI can provide.
Other stakeholders, including many providers, have been more wary of the potential benefits that these new technologies can offer. It would not be prudent to blindly embrace AI or to allow it to replace human decision-making in patient care. But for providers who are skeptical of what these advancing technologies can offer, here are some of the key reasons you should go beyond admiring what AI can do to actively integrating it into your everyday practice.
1: AI Won’t Replace Physicians, but it Will Reduce Burnout
Perhaps one of the biggest concerns among providers is the fear that AI developers are creating a tool to replace physicians in a clinical setting. Responsible AI developers recognize that these tools cannot (and more importantly, should not) replace humans in a medical setting. Instead, AI can be like a powerful assistant that takes over all the mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks clinicians and staff need to do. Things like:
- Clinical documentation and note-taking
- Prior authorization paperwork
- Appointment scheduling and reminders
- Medical coding and billing
While physician burnout has declined in recent years, almost half of clinicians still report feeling stressed. When you combine burnout rates with ever-increasing operational costs that erode the bottom line, embracing AI is a sanity-saving business decision. Providers that welcome operational efficiencies in AI will be better positioned to thrive in a challenging and uncertain healthcare business future.
2: AI Can Help You Make Better Clinical Decisions
Medical doctors rank among the most trusted professions in the world (and nurses top that list). As such, patients place a lot of trust in their medical teams to help them prevent disease, understand their health, and choose the right treatments when necessary. With so little time available to dedicate to each patient, and even less time to stay up to date on all the latest research and treatment options, clinicians can benefit tremendously from using AI in care planning and clinical decision making.
AI-powered clinical decision support tools can quickly sort through troves of data – especially when the tools tap into a source of truth that brings together multiple data sources for each patient, such as claims, imaging, labs, medical and family history, pharmacy data, and social determinants of health. AI can analyze all that information in a matter of seconds and:
- Prioritize patients based on clinical and claims information
- Make diagnostic suggestions
- Identify care gaps
- Predict potential risk for things like avoidable ER visits or hospital admission
- Predict the likelihood that a person has, or will soon be diagnosed with, a chronic condition
It’s like having a second set of eyes scan every aspect of the patient’s data, compare it to the latest tests, medications, treatment recommendations, and medical breakthroughs, and recommend evidence-based next steps to improve health and outcomes. Plus, AI can recall millions of data points across tens of thousands of sources in an instant. These tools won’t replace physicians or care teams – patients still need the wisdom, empathy, and experience of human care providers – but they certainly can augment your abilities.
3: AI Could Help Your Patients Delay or Avoid Chronic Disease
Predictive AI is one of the newest frontiers to improve patient care and overall health and wellness. Machine learning algorithms can now predict, with a high level of accuracy, whether someone is at high risk of developing certain chronic conditions in the next 12 months. This information is significant in the hands of clinical teams, who can use it to develop proactive outreach and care plans that may reduce the patient’s risk – ultimately slowing disease progression or avoiding it entirely.
Since chronic condition treatment and management now accounts for as much as 90% of U.S. healthcare spending, tools that delay its onset or prevent it are one powerful way to reduce total cost of care. Helping patients avoid chronic disease can also dramatically improve their quality of life for months or years to come.
4: AI Will Improve Your Patients’ Experience
Patients today are tech-savvy and expect their healthcare to be able to keep up with a fast-paced world. Millions of people use apps to manage their health with things like step trackers, sleep monitors, blood pressure checks, glucose trends, and more. They want the convenience of virtual visits and data sharing capabilities across multiple providers, health systems, and platforms.
While AI won’t solve the current challenges of our siloed healthcare system, it can bring data together in ways that were not possible even a few years ago. AI tools working behind the scenes in your analytics, care, and payment software platforms can normalize data from hundreds of disparate sources into a single database, then augment it with information that transforms data points into actionable clinical recommendations and care plans. Predictive models identify care gaps, such as a missed mammogram or colonoscopy, and allow for proactive and personalized outreach, so patients get the right care in the right place at the right time.
Embracing AI is the Ethical Choice for Today’s Clinicians
When providers embrace the potential for AI today, they will be better prepared for the promise it holds in the future. Right now, AI tools can streamline operational and administrative tasks, provide evidence-based treatment guidelines at the point of care, help providers close care gaps, and predict the risk of things like chronic disease onset and high-cost utilization. The buzz around AI is not slowing down, so understanding how it works now sets you up for the eventual adoption of advances like generative AI and agentic AI as those capabilities grow.
All physicians take an oath that the health and well-being of your patient will remain your first and most important consideration, and to share your medical knowledge for the benefit of the patient and the advancement of healthcare, among other promises. As healthcare AI expands and provides more opportunity to improve health and outcomes for your patients, it would be unethical to eschew it.
Like many of the groundbreaking medical advances of the last century, understanding and adopting AI in an ethical and responsible way should be a top priority for every healthcare professional.
