MADISON, Wis. (WIFR) – UW Health releases recommendations and regulations for artificial intelligence in health care after a roundtable discussion with 25 leaders at the U.S. Capitol.
Frank Liao, UW Health Senior Director for Digital Health and Emerging Technologies explains that AI is used to lighten the workload for providers. He gives the example of AI pre-drafting messages to combat the large volume of responses providers have to send.
He also mentions that AI can help transcribe notes, which is a large and time-consuming part of a physician’s day. Liao relates their use of AI to spell-check, saying that the responsibility still rests on the physician as it’s not able to auto-send messages. Physicians are required to edit or delete any notes AI writes.
“In some cases, when physicians get overburdened with all of their charting and documentation, they get so behind that they’re trying to remember a visit from 30 days ago. So actually, we think if they can get it done sooner, it actually would improve patient safety because the information is more recent for them,” says Liao.
Liao explains that their use of AI is not patient-facing right now, but in his experience, patients have still noticed it and preferred it because physicians spend less time typing and focus more on the patient.
In the future, Liao predicts that AI will help support clinical decisions by summarizing a patient’s information quickly, specifically in an emergency setting.
“In some cases, an emergency physician has to read the equivalent of Moby Dick in terms of the number of pages and the amount of information in that chart,” Liao explained.
AI may eventually be able to give suggestions to the physician based on its summary of the patient’s medical history and medications.
Liao says, “UW Health is taking a step forward in AI. We’re trying to be very measured and controlled with it. We’re looking at ways that it will help our workforce, and we do think patients will get an indirect benefit through that. We’re excited to keep taking measured steps to see how it will be further used to improve medicine.”