“While there is some skepticism among nurses, I believe that artificial intelligence, when applied in the right environments, is far from a threat,” said Hadassah Backman, CEO of Guardoc, a clinical data integrity company.
She says she is especially hopeful about the power of AI to act as a force multiplier, easing the digital workload so nurses can focus on quality patient care.
Backman says she understands the administrative burden nurses experience through her hands-on experience in emergency departments and hospice care as a nurse and clinical risk consultant.
She says one of AI’s greatest capabilities is its ability to audit charting, improve the accuracy of patient data and flag problems.
“We are seeing the promise of AI come to life, making dramatic improvements in reducing chart errors and freeing up nurses’ time.”
She’s not alone: Mercy’s lead nurse Betty Jo Rocchio, DNP, said this past month when she presented the HIMSS AI at Healthcare Forum. To improve nurse experiences and address staffing challenges, that healthcare system deployed an automated nurse credentialing system and leveraged AI to improve emergency room handoffs across Mercy’s 51 hospitals.
“We need to have the analytics to show that AI initiatives over the past two years have created a more resilient workforce, increased employee retention and saved millions of dollars,” Rocchio said.
In this Q&A session, Guardoc’s Backman describes how other healthcare organizations are also reducing chart errors by as much as 50% per nurse, improving patient outcomes and saving organizations money that can be reinvested in quality improvement and operational efficiency.
Q. The healthcare industry is experiencing a nurse shortage, but nurses face a number of daily operational challenges that are driving many away. Where is the shortage leaving patient care and what do nurses need most from healthcare organizations?
A. I can tell you from my own experience as an ER nurse that the ongoing nursing shortage leaves patient care in a pretty precarious place.
While the profession has always had challenges, the pandemic has led to a widespread nursing shortage, which has only been exacerbated by an aging population demanding more health care. All of these factors together are the reason we are facing the largest nursing shortage in our country’s history.
With fewer nurses on staff, those that remain are incredibly scarce, dealing with more responsibilities than ever before, drowning in paperwork, sometimes dealing with unsafe working conditions and working longer shifts. All of this takes away a lot of time, attention and human capacity to provide the very best in patient care.
Nurses need more support from their healthcare organizations in various forms – compensation, staffing, patient load support, and for the mountains of manual compliance audits and paperwork that nurses have to spend many hours on each month.
Q. What are the key areas that healthcare organizations need to address to improve clinical data integrity?
A. Improving the integrity of clinical data goes a long way in supporting today’s nursing workforce, and I see so much potential in AI’s ability to provide much-needed support in this area. The biggest areas that need to be addressed, and that can be addressed with AI, are integrating disparate data systems, supporting the compliance process, and improving data accuracy.
We’re not talking about AI taking over nurses’ jobs.
Currently, there is no central hub for patient information within healthcare organizations, so there is no easy way to understand a patient’s full history as they are treated. If all that data talked to each other, it would create a much clearer picture and ease the intensive information-gathering process that nurses currently undergo.
Nurses also spend valuable time ensuring that every encounter adheres to strict rules. Automating some compliance processes could free them up and reduce human error. To improve accuracy, advanced AI systems can also analyze patient data and automatically populate charts, reducing the risk of human error.
Imagine AI tools that compare medication orders against the patient’s history, spotting potential problems and making sure everything checks out before a nurse even sees it.
Q. What technologies are you most hopeful about in terms of clinical risk management, and why?
A. In my own work building Guardoc, we’ve seen the power and potential of AI for the future of healthcare. AI can help in areas such as minimizing chart errors by comparing things like medication orders with the patient’s history and flagging potential problems.
It can reduce compliance reporting and documentation management, reducing the risk of human error in these critical but tedious tasks while creating more comprehensive patient records. By integrating data from different sources, healthcare providers gain a more complete picture of a patient’s history and needs.
Q. How has artificial intelligence identified error rates and are nurses testing clinical data validation models prepared to use them?
A. Over the past eight months, we have tested our clinical risk technology at six US healthcare organizations. The clinics using our product have experienced improvements such as:
- A 50% reduction in average charting errors per nurse.
- An 86% reduction in errors impacting patient outcomes.
- Two clinics experienced a 100% citation-free state investigation, a dramatic improvement over previous records of more than 23 documentation-related errors.
- An expected annual reduction of 90% in the hours nurses spend on audits.
These early results give me so much hope and optimism about what AI can bring to the future of healthcare and how we can improve the role of nurses, their overall work-life balance, and the patient care they can provide.
Q. How does clinical validation technology improve an organization’s revenue management?
A. First, automating and improving the clinical documentation and compliance process helps prevent costly errors that can be caused by humans. Compliance errors are not just accidental missteps. They can result in major financial losses for healthcare organizations in the form of fines, lawsuits, and delayed or paused reimbursements (an average of $40 billion annually across the industry), putting facilities and nurses’ wages at risk.
By automating compliance checks and improving data accuracy, clinical validation technology can help organizations avoid fines and secure payments they might otherwise miss.
It also streamlines the audit process. Currently, nurses spend a lot of time manually ensuring that every patient encounter is compliant. Automating more of this process not only reduces the risk of errors, but also frees up nursing staff to focus on patient care rather than paperwork.
All in all, clinical validation technology has the potential to prevent revenue loss and help organizations more efficiently capture the revenue they deserve. But it’s not just about making more money – it’s about ensuring healthcare providers have the resources they need to continue providing quality care.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.