AI in Healthcare: Examples that Transform Care

What is AI in Healthcare?

Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is the application of AI technology in medical and healthcare operations to improve the delivery of patient care.

While key decision makers maintain autonomy on resource allocation, AI in healthcare also facilitates budget optimization, no matter the size of the practice. Aside from its known utility in medical research, AI has proven useful in various clinical settings where documentation is becoming increasingly complex yet important.

In this article, we explore how AI and health meet halfway in shaping global practices and in helping maintain standards in compliance, all while boosting patient care without losing resources.

What’s Driving the System-Level Adoption of AI for Healthcare?

A major driver of the system-level adoption of AI in healthcare is the cumulative burden on caregivers, who are the crux of healthcare. Not only do they carry the burden of administrative tasks, but they also face emotional demands on a daily basis. This strain continues to grow as the demand for healthcare needs rises while the workforce supply lags in pace.

The ongoing healthcare workforce shortage implies that the need for support is urgent. By 2030, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that people over the age of 60 will reach 1.4 billion. Prolonged life expectancy means that multiplying needs in care coordination is underway, not limited to, but especially for the elderly.

Artificial intelligence in healthcare extends support capacity to close this gap. It aids care delivery through the following applications: 

• Remote patient monitoring (RPM),
• The improvement of triage performance in emergency departments, 
• The earlier detection of the decline in cognitive abilities for senior patients, and
• Significantly cutting admin time for clinicians to invest more time in patients

Healthcare AI providers respond to these demands by offering various modern solutions, one of which is for documentation, like AI medical scribes.

While the goal is to enhance care quality at a broader scale, tools as simple as AI scribes cultivate job fulfillment among clinicians on a granular level. This is just one of the ways in which AI supports healthcare, but it could always mean happier clinicians and more patients better cared for.

In this video, Dr. Thomas Kelly shares what truly drives clinical adoption, featuring real-world results from systems like Beth Israel Lahey Health and NHS trusts.

What is the Role of AI in Healthcare?

The role of AI in healthcare is impacting clinical practices and patients in ways that improve workflows and cut costs. This does not mean, in any way, that AI is taking over the role of clinicians. It only means that AI is designed to adapt to existing workflows, where it handles the repetitive manual workload so that clinicians can spend more time seeing patients.

Artificial intelligence in healthcare has seen tremendous growth in adoption rates, and AI medical scribes are no exception. Presented with real-world challenges, AI in healthcare was able to help combat existing and modern workflow disruptions. Let’s take a look at how care providers in different contexts used Heidi to overcome these challenges.

Healthcare AI Data Governance: Ensuring Patient Trust

How patient data is governed within emerging AI healthcare tools, especially AI medical scribes, is generally a barrier to their adoption. Privacy regulatory bodies like HIPAA are in place to ensure patient data is safely handled. Patients trust AI providers, especially Heidi, because it offers an AI-powered scribing solution with robust compliance.

Patient trust is fostered through a more conversational approach to patient care, and this is a Heidi benefit highlighted by early adopters of AI in healthcare like Dr. Chris Bojrab, President of the Indiana Health Group. The team understood how AI tools can optimize operations at work, but they sought solutions that allow them more time to spend with patients. Thankfully, Heidi was here to save the day.

"Before, I had to choose between having a crappy note or sacrificing the face-to-face experience with patients," says Dr. Bojrab. "I'd either be madly typing to capture everything or trying to stay present while knowing my documentation would suffer."

Aside from the significant improvement to more meaningful patient conversations, Dr. Borjab appreciates Heidi for its ability to boost company earnings:

“For us, it's mainly a quality of life thing... it allows me to build a better note but at the same time actually talk to my patient more conversationally, be more present in the moment and still wind up with a good note. I can imagine that for a lot of practices, this will allow you to better document things so you can capture more reimbursement. So revenue enhancement.”

As AI becomes more integrated into clinical workflows, patient trust hinges on how responsibly these tools are implemented. In episode 2 of the Heidi Compliance Series, Hugo Henderson and Yass Omar discuss what it really means to keep patients safe and informed when using AI in healthcare like Heidi.

How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping the Healthcare Industry

The role of AI in healthcare is scalable at large, and it can be seen in how it reshapes existing operational workflows. For larger care providers, handling time pressure while reaching out to a diverse patient community adds to the complexities in documentation.

Heidi, being a specialty-agnostic AI medical scribe, has no problem accommodating multiple languages, even in disadvantaged areas.

“We’re out in West Auckland. It's a low-decile area. We have a large proportion of Māori, Polynesian, and quite a large proportion of Asian patients. Sometimes there can be language barriers,” mentions Dr. Slushna Weeramuni, Deputy Clinical Director at Tāmaki Health.

"Sometimes patients have maybe three or four consultations, right? Now, I copy those consults into Heidi and then I'd say ‘write a letter to the specialist’ and Heidi picks it up really well - way faster than I could do it."

Heidi’s AI capabilities supported the team at Tāmaki Health to gain unexpected benefits, ultimately improving the workforce spirit and resulting in happier clinicians. “It’s all about ‘better for all’ - accessible healthcare, a team environment, down-to-earth, with strong team spirit,” adds Sarah Stueber, Programme Lead at Tāmaki Health.

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Examples

Examples of AI in healthcare are as vast as they can be integrated deeply into different practices. Below are other AI in healthcare examples showcasing other specialty use cases.

AI in Healthcare Example 1: Augmenting Diagnostic Imaging

While having several uses in healthcare, AI is used in the augmentation of diagnostic imaging. For example, in a multicenter diagnostic study, AI was observed to help radiologists identify previously overlooked nodules.

However, it is noteworthy that the final diagnostic decisions remained with the radiologists; AI served only as an assistive tool in the comprehensive diagnostic imaging process.

AI in Healthcare Example 2: Enhancing Precision Medicine

Another study on personalized medicine underscored the usefulness of AI in parsing data-intensive measurements from multi-omic data. This included information from genetic sequencing and protein profiling. The AI synthesized this data into actionable insights that can help structure personalized treatment plans.

AI in Healthcare Example 3: Streamlining Clinical Documentation

An emerging use case for AI in healthcare is in clinical documentation, which is a major contributor to burnout among health professionals.

Recent studies have shown the efficacy of products like AI medical scribes to reduce the cognitive load coming from administrative tasks. As a result, clinician productivity has increased by an average of 5.8%, a profound improvement that can’t simply be ignored.

AI in Healthcare Example 4: Improving Billing and Coding Accuracy

The necessity to standardize how medical services are documented naturally grew as healthcare became more complex.

To maintain sustainability and minimize errors in insurance-based billing, AI has contributed to simplifying the process through automated coding. This initiative has resulted in improved reimbursement efficiencies as well as reduced miscommunication between care providers and recipients.

Make Care More Human with Heidi AI

Clinicians operate at an advantage when they use AI in their workflow, especially at this rate. Built to serve clinicians and uphold high-quality care, Heidi makes care more human, more accessible, more secure. With Heidi, you can win through:

• Early adopter advantage: Early AI scribe adopters generally improve patient outcomes, as doctors can significantly make a difference by providing care that is more thorough and intuitive.
• Restored eye contact: Heidi maintains care continuity as it handles documentation while you focus on patient engagement, letting you practice medicine the way you always envisioned.
• Robust standard compliance: No matter how customized and specialized your notes get, you can produce them with consistent quality with Heidi.

Complying with global data security regulations, Heidi supports 200+ specialties with over 2 million consultations per week. Heidi ensures data localization for customers in Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, and beyond.

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Frequently Asked Questions about AI in Healthcare

How popular is AI in healthcare?

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in AI in healthcare sectors, not limited to, but including primary care. As the application of AI in medicine and healthcare is continuously explored, interest is projected to increase indefinitely. Current trends of AI services in healthcare have providers reporting around 40% improvement in efficiency due to AI solutions.

Which country is using AI in healthcare?

Several countries utilize AI in healthcare, including Australia, the United Kingdom, the US, Canada, China, Italy, and Germany, among others. This global adoption helps address the current shortage of healthcare providers. The UK recently saw the largest launch of ambient AI, a collaborative effort between Heidi Health and Modality Partnership, serving nearly 500,000 registered patients nationwide.

How is AI disrupting healthcare?

In healthcare, AI is “disrupting” workflows by shifting the patient-clinician dynamic, where documentation is no longer the bottleneck. For example, clinicians like Dr. David Canes experienced a rather “supercharged” effect using Heidi’s AI in his practice: by delivering care with higher quality and less fatigue. In this sense, AI “disrupted” his workflow by breaking the old notion that more patients means more admin tasks, leading to more exhaustion.