Real examples of implementing AI for clinical efficiency

Implementing AI for real clinical impact

Clinician burnout, rising demand, and administrative complexity are squeezing practices of every size. The healthcare industry has largely recognized both the benefits and the inevitability of leveraging AI to address those challenges. What is to be determined, however, is the best approach to ensure that AI adoption doesn’t come at the expense of humanity in healthcare.

At a panel earlier this year for an athenahealth event, leaders from three different healthcare organizations shared how they used AI-native functionality in athenaOne® to solve problems. They also share their approaches to keeping their organizations thoughtful and responsible in their implementation.

Creating space for more humanity in the encounter

Despite differences in size and specialty, each organization shared a similar objective for clinical efficiency: improving speed and ease of documentation for physicians to create more space for humanity in the clinical encounter.

Sap Sinha, Chief Operating Officer at Allied Digestive Health, discusses how ADH deployed ambient AI across athenaOne to transcribe and structure visit conversations and saw immediate results. At his organization, physicians completed documentation faster, coding accuracy improved, and denials declined. “Ambient AI actually reduces physician burnout,” he said.*

His organization is also on a beta test for an upcoming AI-native feature in athenaOne called Chart Assistant with Sage™, an AI chart assistant that serves as an interactive clinical aid in the patient chart.

“I think there's a lot of good things now, with the advent of technology and AI and how it is moving, that can improve physicians’ day to day,” Sinha says.

Protecting physicians’ time in a way that works for them

Bob Girard, Chief Financial Operating Officer at Whole Life Health Care, shared how AI in healthcare can help his organization tackle their challenge of patient volume. “We have a waiting list of about 900 patients waiting to get in, and we’re a small family practice,” he says. “The answer is not for our physicians to see more patients and work longer days.”

In identifying the right tools to address this challenge, Girard spoke to the importance of clinical workflows that are tailored to how each provider works. “We don’t want to automate the humanity out of health care,” he says. Some of the physicians at his organization are using Ambient AI as an integral part of their work, and some are taking “baby steps,” as he put it.

Change management guided by empathy

At Raleigh Neurology, Amy Roberts – Director of Health Information and IT – shares that physicians at her organization were so eager to adopt AI tools in their clinical work that they had to centralize and formalize the tools people were using. “It’s not a question of whether the AI will work for us, it’s how it will work for us,” she says.

For Roberts, leveraging AI in clinical workflows felt like a no-brainer, but the challenge in rolling that out was in how to communicate that to the organization and ensure everyone is bought in and brought along.

Similarly, Girard shares how Whole Life Health relies on internal product advocates, experts in athenaOne within his organization, and inclusive communication to bring staff along. As he puts it, “We’re going to be very thoughtful with how we move forward, let’s make sure we’re making a decision that we’re all comfortable with.”

Find solutions tailored to how you work

These leaders used AI to solve specific, measurable problems, not to chase trends. With athenaOne, they each have an open, integrated platform and marketplace of partners to develop a suite of functionality tailored to their practice, a key to success.

These leaders have leveraged AI to solve specific, measurable problems and to prepare their organizations for the future. Each of them spoke to the importance of empathy, thoughtfulness, and targeted goals in choosing the right solutions and rolling them out with intentionality.

If your organization is evaluating how to incorporate AI to tackle previously daunting challenges, you can learn from these organizations’ success. Start with a focused pilot, recruit internal champions, and use an open platform to bring the right specialty tools into your workflows.

Explore athenaOne’s AI-native capabilities to learn more.