While podcasters and pundits continue to pontificate about the implications of artificial intelligence, it’s already having a significant impact for St. Louis–area health care providers. They’re leveraging AI to improve patient care with predictive modeling and making communication more efficient.
“Think of AI as a really smart, well-trained graduate assistant that helps our clinicians answer questions quickly,” says Joe Kelly, executive vice president and chief transformation and business development officer at Mercy. Last year, Mercy and Microsoft announced a long-term partnership to use generative AI and other digital technologies with the goal of freeing up more one-on-one time for clinicians and patients. “That [partnership] has enabled us to build our intelligent data platform,” says Kelly. “It has really provided us the capability and the possibility to apply generative AI into our environment to benefit patients.”
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Mercy is also using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service for AI-assisted communication between patients and clinicians, as well as a benefits chatbot for Mercy employees, and an efficient nursing-handoff paperwork process. Many physicians also use generative AI to document conversations during patient visits; the secure information is then uploaded to an electronic medical record.
St. Louis Children’s Hospital is using a positive computing model developed by the Innovation Lab at BJC HealthCare and WashU to identify pediatric patients at risk of readmission and to complete follow-ups. “We leverage a model that allows us to target our more complex patient populations to ensure that the limited resources our team has are focused on the populations most likely to benefit from outreach from one of our nurse navigators,” says Lauren Fischer, director of care management for WashU’s Faculty Practice Plan.
During follow-up calls, nurses review next steps for patients and their families to route them to primary care physicians or specialists and identify potential roadblocks to care. “Our intent is to reduce readmissions,” says Fischer. “It’s to improve outcomes and do what we can to decrease utilization so that we have patients paying fewer costs, as well as fewer costs on the health care side.”
BJC and the WashU School of Medicine have far-reaching goals for AI integration, opening the AI for Health Institute in 2023 to foster collaboration between AI researchers and health care experts. Less than a year later, the group has more than 100 WashU faculty members from a range of schools and departments. The institute has four core AI research initiatives: equity, fairness, and privacy; wearable health care technology; imaging; and natural language processing.
So far, the interdisciplinary team has conducted research on predictive models, tracking such issues as physician burnout and surgical outcomes, as well as wearable technology to aid with contact tracing and mental health diagnoses.
“The driving mission of the AIHealth Institute is to bring together AI researchers and clinical investigators,” notes Chenyang Lu, the institute’s founding director, “to forge new paths to solve significant health problems with advanced data-driven tools.”
