Hospitals Are a Proving Ground for What AI Can Do, and What It Can't

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While the aging populations’ healthcare needs rise, hospitals are looking for ways to deal with persistent worker shortages that can burn out clinicians and delay care. They are also looking for efficiency wherever they can find it while cuts to Medicaid loom. AI has especially broken through in some of the least-flashy, but most labor-intensive, tasks hospitals deal with daily: taking notes, fielding patient phone calls and dealing with insurance claims.

Doctors still make medical decisions, though AI can aid the process. A University of California, Los Angeles, study last year, for example, found that AI was better able to identify subtle signs of breast cancer that can develop and grow undetected between routine screenings. The study estimated that using AI to help screen patients could reduce such breast cancers by 30%.

At the same time, there are reasons for caution.

Mayo Clinic cardiologist Paul A. Friedman turned to ChatGPT when he needed to weigh in on the case of a patient who needed a defibrillator implantation a few days after having heart surgery. Friedman thought such a procedure was feasible and safe but wanted to know whether there were case studies. ChatGPT responded by giving him references to several reports published in medical journals that it said showed such a procedure was “safe and effective.” Friedman said “it looked very realistic” until a colleague tried searching for the studies only to discover they were completely fabricated.

After that experience, Friedman said, he takes a “trust but verify” approach. “It’s not that I don’t ask ChatGPT medical questions but, when I do, I always look for the references, click on them and read the abstracts at a minimum,” he said. The hospital’s cardiology department is testing alternative in-house AI tools.

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At Northwestern, an AI review of a million scans taken over a year highlighted 70 that humans hadn’t flagged for further review. A manual check then showed five instances where physicians deemed that more follow-up was needed. Northwestern is also using another AI tool to schedule operating-room time more efficiently, which means more patients can be treated, officials there say.

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In Northern California, Kaiser Permanente’s 21 hospitals use a system that analyzes all patients’ vitals and charts and scores them every hour to determine which patients are at highest risk. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found the system saves more than 500 lives a year. On a recent day, the system determined that a heart-failure patient required more scrutiny, leading physicians to learn he was also suffering from a severe respiratory virus and needed steroids for his lungs, said Vincent Liu, a pulmonary critical-care physician at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center.

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