Houston Methodist is teaming up with ambient artificial intelligence company Ambience Healthcare on a collaboration to integrate AI into emergency departments and inpatient care settings.
This collaboration seeks to improve both efficiency and patient care, according to an announcement.
The new capabilities will allow Houston Methodist to address unique documentation and workflow challenges in those settings, the health system said.
"As the burden of documentation and coding demands continues to expand across medicine, we are committed to finding new ways to relieve our encumbered clinicians with AI technology that enhances the patient-provider experience," said Dr. Jordan Dale, chief medical information officer and chief health AI officer at Houston Methodist.
WHAT'S THE IMPACT
Research from the American Medical Association has found that emergency department clinicians often report the highest levels of burnout in healthcare; meanwhile, a study published in ScienceDirect found that these clinicians complete an average of 4,000 mouse clicks during a busy shift.
Hospitalists face similarly intricate workflows with wide-ranging patient acuity, frequent patient handoffs and highly detailed, complex documentation needs.
What the collaboration will allow Houston Methodist to do is capture provider-patient conversations and gather details for admissions, discharge/disposition, medical decision-making and procedural documentation. Chart-aware documentation extracts information from relevant charts, such as labs and any past notes.
The AI technology is designed to understand the specific coding needs of each care setting, while smart dictation context-aware patient and discharge summaries, and multi-speaker attribution features are designed to help clinicians more easily juggle multiple patients.
It also helps reduce "click mileage," or the number of times per day a clinician clicks with their mouse, by eliminating the need for copy-pasting documentation.
"To truly have impacted a health system, we had to go beyond the ambulatory setting," said Ambiance Health CEO Michael Ng.
THE LARGER TREND
Emergency physicians across the U.S. are facing increasing financial and operational pressures that are threatening their ability to provide care, according to a RAND report published this month.
Emergency physicians ensure access to care for all patients as mandated by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). Although emergency physicians make up only 4% of all physicians, they provide approximately two-thirds of uninsured patients' acute care, the data showed.
Jeff Lagasse is editor of Healthcare Finance News.
Email: jlagasse@himss.org
Healthcare Finance News is a HIMSS Media publication.