AI-enabled efficiencies can improve patient outcomes and reduce clinician burnout
Healthcare organizations are known for tracking as much data as they can collect. And rightly so: with so many valuable insights and patterns that can be derived from all that patient information, more is more.
But healthcare systems face challenges when this data becomes unmanageable: disorganized and in silos, partially stored in dusty offices and outdated existing systems. Of more than 30% of the world’s data generated by healthcare systems, it is impossible for overloaded IT teams to keep up.
The result is that doctors and nurses lose valuable time sifting through irrelevant data and contribute to the burnout of hospital staff who are already spread too thin.
Most healthcare IT experts agree that artificial intelligence can help. But how?
Rick Bryant is Healthcare Chief Technology Officer at Veritas Technologies, a data optimization and performance company. We caught up with him to discuss why hospital IT leaders should look to AI to solve data management challenges. how efficiencies with AI can lead to better patient outcomes and actionable steps healthcare IT administrators can take to streamline data sorting and analysis to provide more valuable insights for patient care, support IT teams and reduce patient burnout reduce staff.
Q. You say IT leaders in hospitals and healthcare systems should look to AI to solve data management challenges. Why AI?
A. The healthcare industry faces a unique set of issues that create a perfect storm of technical challenges. These challenges are not just the concern of IT departments. They can also prevent nurses and doctors from doing their best and most efficient work treating patients.
With more than 30% of the world’s data generated by healthcare systems, it is impossible for IT teams to continue using manual processes alone, especially when working within limited budgets. AI and autonomous solutions are the best tools to integrate into hospital systems’ existing data management strategies, as even the most basic investment in this technology can have a dramatic impact on ROI and efficiency.
AI speeds up and streamlines the process of analyzing, sorting, and categorizing data so that information can be properly deleted or archived. Combining this technology with the guidance and expertise of IT staff makes data management less difficult for employees to do alone.
IT also makes it easier for doctors and hospital administration staff to access data and use it for practical use.
In addition to creating operational efficiencies, AI can help eliminate human error in data management and improve data compliance enforcement, which is critical to patient data. Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, and by combining the data expertise of IT staff with AI-powered management tools, hospitals and other healthcare organizations can meet regulatory requirements and deliver data efficiency benefits to hospital staff on the front lines .
Q. How exactly can the efficiencies gained from using AI with data management challenges lead to better patient outcomes?
A. Healthcare systems are known for retaining data, and for good reason. Historical patient information contains valuable insights about a person’s health, so keeping track of old data is essential to delivering the best possible care.
Healthcare workers spend a lot of time on mundane, administrative tasks such as taking notes, reporting and managing past patient records so that they can be incorporated into current treatment plans. That’s time that could be spent with patients. AI tools free up this time by synthesizing patient records to provide nurses and doctors with the most relevant information, at a fraction of the speed.
In this way, AI can help reduce burnout among healthcare providers by reducing stress on physicians and ensuring they have all the information they need to treat patients and make care decisions. This has a direct impact on patient outcomes and the hospital experience, as frontline staff can deliver a better experience without taking the burden off their shoulders.
From a broader perspective, data efficiently organized in today’s increasingly multi-cloud infrastructure can be used by AI-powered autonomous systems to identify patterns that could lead to future discoveries and improvements in patient treatment.
For example, AI can analyze patient data to identify similarities in cases and treatment plans. These insights bring a data-driven perspective directly to frontline staff working on difficult diagnoses.
Ask. Please provide some actionable steps that healthcare IT leaders can take to streamline data sorting and analysis through AI to, as you say, deliver more valuable insights for patient care, better support IT teams, and reduce burn to reduce staff outage.
A. Using AI-powered autonomous solutions to organize data in silos can have a huge impact on healthcare systems for both workers on the frontlines and behind the scenes. The first step in implementing these tools is for leadership to evaluate their organizations’ current data management practices.
When data is spread across digital and physical documents, it’s important to transfer copies to the cloud so staff can access them without the time-consuming task of sorting through hundreds – or thousands – of paper documents.
AI can be implemented alongside existing data management practices to synthesize and de-duplicate data and analyze which information is useful to keep readily available and which can be appropriately archived.
This streamlines the overwhelming amount of information that healthcare systems manage every day by surfacing and connecting relevant details. Considering the individual level, this can allow physicians to quickly and easily gain a comprehensive view of a patient’s overall health and treatment plan so they can make data-driven care decisions.
Breakthrough technology such as AI-powered autonomous data management solutions can help IT staff with their daily tasks, create operational efficiencies for administrative staff, and give healthcare providers the most accurate patient information available.
By prioritizing healthy data management practices through the use of AI, IT leaders can have a dramatic impact on the day-to-day experiences in a healthcare organization.
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