Ambient voice genAI poised to reduce burnout, says Stanford’s digital health chief
Stanford Health Care, based in Palo Alto, California, is often at the forefront of technological innovation. As a result, healthcare IT leaders at healthcare providers across the country can look to Stanford for lessons learned.
That is the purpose of an educational session with a case study The health system will lead the charge at the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum, scheduled for Sept. 5-6 in Boston. The session will focus on how Stanford approaches the implementation and evaluation of generative AI applications.
Troy Foster, director of digital health at Stanford Health Care, will be speaking at the session. We interviewed him to get a taste of what he’ll be discussing in Boston.
Q. What will you focus on during your HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum session and why is it relevant in today’s healthcare?
A. With growing concerns about burnout and capacity issues among healthcare providers and clinicians, many technology companies are turning to AI and other solutions to address these issues.
One of the promising opportunities that is rapidly gaining traction is in the area of ambient voice. The ability of a technology to offload significant amounts of clinical documentation time will allow physicians to spend more time with patients.
Q. What is an example of ambient voice and genAI in action at your organization?
A. Stanford Health Care recently completed a pilot with several of our providers using an integrated ambient voice solution between Epic Rover and Microsoft DAX CoPilot. This solution uses a patented ChatGPT engine to populate Epic smart fields with suggested summaries of a patient consultation.
Once the patient has consented, providers simply start the recording when the patient comes in and within minutes of the consultation being completed, providers can review, edit, and approve the documentation in Epic. This can potentially save our practitioners a significant amount of time versus creating all of the notes from scratch.
Q. What are some key points you hope session participants will learn and apply with their healthcare providers?
A. While this is a potentially game-changing technology for practitioners, it is still very new and needs to be refined. Early feedback is that some love it and some hate it – with a wide range of opinions in between. Some providers are using the note-writing process to assess the consultation and make their clinical decisions accordingly.
The ChatGPT summaries are often still too wordy or lack precision and require extensive editing, which for some people negates the potential time savings. Academic medical centers, with multiple residents, interns, and other practitioners in the room, create problems with documentation.
In short, the technology has enormous potential, but it is still a work in progress.
Healthcare organizations need to properly socialize and oversee the rollout and implementation of ambient voice. However, it is clear that this is a technology with enormous potential to have a dramatic and positive impact on reducing burnout and increasing the capacity of our healthcare providers.
Attend this session at the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum taking place September 5-6 in Boston. More information and registration.
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