GenAI’s Role in Enhancing the Patient and Provider Experience
AI transformation in healthcare
By Vanessa Sam with contributions from Jamie Bautista
“I’m leaving this medical group after 30 years of practicing here, Vanessa. I have made the decision to join concierge medicine where I can take care of my patients the way I want to,” Dr. Sandi G., my dedicated, warm, and loving primary care physician, told me as I sat in her office, seeing her for the last time. She assured me that her decision was not an easy one to make, but the top-down-driven administrative changes that had swept through her practice, including a 15-minute limit on visits, centralized call centers with little practice-specific knowledge, and increased administrative responsibilities such as additional electronic medical record (EMR) patients had stifled her ability to provide the care she believed her patients deserved.
Her predicament reflects a larger issue in healthcare, one that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is poised to address: how we might harness GenAI’s transformative potential to both provide a better care experience and to positively impact each facet of the Quintuple Aim of Healthcare to 1) enhance patient experience, 2) improve provider well-being, 3) reduce costs, 4) improve population health, and 5) advance health equity.
Dr. G.’s story highlights the challenges healthcare providers face today. Corporate-driven changes are often well-intentioned because they typically aim to improve system-wide efficiencies and cut down on operational costs. The practical implications of these changes, however, can diminish the quality of patient care. Limited time with patients, lost personal connections, and an overwhelming administrative burden can leave providers feeling like they are racing against the clock instead of focusing on patient needs. On the other side of the spectrum, patients often bear the brunt of these challenges. Shorter appointment times can leave them feeling rushed and unheard, or worse, the reasons for their visit unaddressed. The disconnect from their healthcare providers due to the increased reliance on centralized shared services and technology can create frustration and confusion, making them feel like just another entry on the medical chart.
Enter GenAI: a groundbreaking addition to the artificial intelligence landscape known for its capacity to “generate” new content, including art, music, text, and even source code. Whereas traditional AI produces outputs based on existing data (think Siri or Amazon’s e-commerce recommendations) that are reproducible, GenAI responds by producing entirely new data that closely resembles human-created content. Using large language models (LLMs), GenAI’s ability to generate human-like text/interactions offers impact across the healthcare landscape by resolving some of the frustrations resulting from the deterioration of personal touch in the interactions between patients and providers.
Clinical documentation — a perfect GenAI use case
“There are ample studies that show that nurses and physicians and respiratory therapists… spend a huge amount of time documenting and then being unable to find the information that is the most critical information later. So I think that we’re… likely to see a lot of work on assisting people in tasks that take them away from the bedside and away from the cognitive or procedural or emotional work of being a clinician.” –Michael Howell, MD, MPH, a pulmonologist and chief clinical officer at Google
Let’s dive deeper into a specific GenAI use case of the clinical documentation process, which often adds hours to a clinician’s day as an administrative burden. Technology giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all investing in technology to reduce this documentation burden, which will free providers to focus on patients while ensuring accuracy through the ability to capture, transcribe, and analyze information with a high degree of precision.
In July 2023, Amazon launched a new AI-powered service designed to assist healthcare software providers in simplifying the documentation requirements for clinicians and continues to make substantial investments in GenAI to stay competitive with rivals. Microsoft, for instance, has poured $13 billion into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and is actively integrating this technology into healthcare software through partnerships with Epic. Similarly, Google has teamed up with health systems like HCA Healthcare to enhance time-consuming tasks, such as clinical documentation, using generative AI. Google has also broadened its specialized medical information-focused generative AI model, Med-PaLM, to cater to more healthcare clients. Innovative tech companies on a smaller scale are also competing in this space, differentiating themselves by being more agile, cost-effective, and specialized in their approach. Two notable examples are Yobi and Nuance Communications, both focusing on advanced speech recognition. These investments and innovations represent only the tip of the iceberg.
Clinical documentation is an integral part of patient care, serving as a crucial reference for future treatment decisions, documentation for reimbursement, and legal compliance. However, the demands of documentation can sometimes interfere with the personal connections and attentive care that patients seek. GenAI’s natural language processing capabilities enable it to actively listen to conversations between healthcare providers and patients. This real-time analysis allows GenAI to create accurate and comprehensive documentation seamlessly, minimizing the need for manual data entry. The advanced algorithms of GenAI can comprehend medical jargon, nuances, and context, ensuring there is contextual understanding.
The benefits of this technology are multi-fold. With GenAI handling the documentation process, patients can experience undivided attention and improved communication from their providers, strengthening trust and building a stronger patient-provider relationship. Accurate and transparent documentation also empowers patients by enabling shared decision making. For providers, accuracy and efficiency are a huge plus; it reduces the risk of errors and reduces time for manual note-taking. Providers can experience reduced burnout and increased job satisfaction, enabling them to focus on their true passion — caring for patients.
Ethical and responsible AI in healthcare
“Gen AI holds tremendous promise for health care but requires guardrails to ensure safety and efficacy.” –Dennis Chornenky, chief AI advisor at UC Davis Health and CEO of Domelabs AI
The deployment and incorporation of GenAI into healthcare holds great promise and simultaneously necessitates a deep exploration of responsible AI practices. Ethical considerations surrounding patient privacy, data security, and equitable access to these transformative technologies must be a top priority to protect patients and build trust.
Automation bias
There can be an inclination to overly rely on AI recommendations, potentially sidelining human judgment. This bias can manifest in several ways, such as over-trust in GenAI-powered diagnostic and treatment recommendations, failure to challenge GenAI-driven clinical decisions, lack of accountability, and diminishing medical expertise in favor of AI-generated insights. These risks can lead to overlooking valuable clinical experience and judgment, making it challenging to pinpoint responsibility in the event of adverse outcomes, missing critical medical insights, making incorrect decisions, and even a lack of human clinical judgment and oversight. To mitigate these risks when adopting GenAI, healthcare organizations should promote human oversight and skepticism, provide training and awareness about the capabilities and limitations of GenAI, and implement feedback loops to continuously improve the GenAI system.
Privacy and consent
Effective use of GenAI requires clear patient consent and robust privacy measures to ensure that patient information is handled securely to comply with regulations like HIPAA. However, the complexities of GenAI could make it hard to ensure patient consent is informed. In addition, if healthcare systems lack proper patient data security controls, introducing GenAI risks unauthorized access, breaches, and even de-anonymizing patient data. To mitigate data privacy and consent risks, organizations can implement data encryption to protect it from unauthorized access, authorization policies including role-based access controls and strong authentication mechanisms (i.e., 2FA), leveraging open-source and user-provided data, and being transparent when presenting AI-generated outputs such as by using watermarks or in-app messaging.
Data integrity and bias
GenAI can present bias and data integrity risks to organizations seeking to adopt it. Bias in AI can result from biased training data, algorithmic design, or other aspects of development and deployment. Data Integrity, in the context of organizational adoption of GenAI, refers to the accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness of the data used to train and operate AI systems. Compromised data integrity can result in AI systems making incorrect or biased decisions. Maintaining data integrity is crucial to ensure that AI systems generate reliable and trustworthy outputs and avoid discriminatory or unequal treatment of individuals or groups based on race, gender, age, or other protected characteristics. To rectify bias issues, organizations can implement bias mitigation techniques during the development of GenAI models, ensure the development teams and sources are diverse, and create feedback loops for continuous data monitoring and for users/stakeholders to report bias they encounter.
Health equity
The adoption of GenAI poses inherent risks of perpetuating health disparities. From an input standpoint, ensuring that the data used to train GenAI is gathered from diverse sources and representative of all patient populations is critical in helping prevent the continuation of inherent biases in the data. From an output point of view, ensuring that the technology and its benefits are accessible to everyone, especially marginalized communities, regardless of socioeconomic background, is essential to prevent healthcare disparities from widening. Additionally, ongoing education and awareness about the potential biases and limitations of GenAI are crucial for responsible and equitable implementation. Robust regulatory frameworks and guidelines that prioritize fairness and equitable access should be in place to safeguard against unintentional widening of health disparities, which is detrimental to advancing health equity.
“How do we protect the privacy and safety of patients while we try to together figure out the chance to improve health on the planetary scale.”–Michael Howell, MD, MPH, a pulmonologist and chief clinical officer at Google
Healthcare reimagined with GenAI
Picture this: Dr. G. begins her day unburdened by administrative tasks, aided by human-like GenAI technology. As her patients speak, the technology listens, transcribes, and comprehends their words in real-time, ensuring accurate and detailed documentation. Dr. G. can now provide undivided attention to her patients, fostering a more compassionate and thorough patient-provider relationship. For patients like you and me, this means unhurried appointments, clearer communication, and easy access to comprehensive visit summaries. Our health and the care we receive is personal and intimate, and we deserve a thoughtful, empathetic, and equitable approach. In this envisioned scenario, GenAI has revolutionized one facet of the healthcare experience.
As GenAI continues to evolve, we will continue to explore various facets of healthcare and human-focused solutions. This blog post is just the beginning; stay tuned for a series of articles where we delve deeper into the ways GenAI could be transforming other facets of healthcare and contributing to fulfilling the Quintuple Aim of Healthcare. Find out more about Slalom’s approach to AI. Our motto: “Impossible? That was yesterday.” To us, AI isn’t just a technology — it’s an approach to enabling the advancement of humanity. It’s about how we augment artificial intelligence to support human intelligence, empowering us to reach our limitless potential.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
