Palo Alto, California-based Stanford Health Care is often ahead of the curve when it comes to technology innovation. As a result, health IT leaders at provider organizations across the country can look to Stanford for lessons to be learned.

That is the goal of a case study educational session the health system will be leading at the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum, scheduled for September 5-6 in Boston. The session will focus on how Stanford is approaching the implementation and evaluation of generative AI applications. 

Troy Foster, director of digital health at Stanford Health Care, is scheduled to speak during the session. We interviewed him to get a sneak peek of what he'll be discussing in Boston.

Q. What will you be focusing on in your HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum session and why is it relevant in healthcare today?

A. Given the growing concern around provider and clinician burnout and capacity, many technology companies are focusing on AI and other solutions to address these problems.

One of the more promising opportunities that is quickly gaining traction is in the area of ambient voice. The ability of a technology to offload significant amounts of clinical documentation time will allow for more time for practitioners to spend with patients.

Q. What is an example of ambient voice and genAI in action at your organization?

A. Stanford Health Care recently completed a pilot with some of our providers who use an integrated ambient voice solution between Epic Rover and Microsoft DAX CoPilot that uses a proprietary ChatGPT engine to populate Epic smart fields with suggested summarizations from a patient consult.

Upon consent from the patient, providers simply start the recording when the patient enters and within minutes after the consult is complete, the providers can review, edit as necessary and then approve the documentation within Epic. This potentially can save our practitioners significant amounts of time instead of creating all notes from scratch.

Q. What are a couple of takeaways you hope session attendees will learn and be able to apply back at their provider organizations?

A. Although this is a potential game-changing technology for practitioners, it is still very new and needs refinement. The early feedback is some love it and some hate it – with a wide variety of opinions in between. Some providers use the process of writing notes to review the consult and make their clinical decisions accordingly.

The ChatGPT summaries still are often too verbose or lack preciseness and require extensive editing, which for some people negates any of the potential time saved. Academic medical centers, having multiple residents, interns and other practitioners in the room, causes issues with documentation.

In short, the technology has enormous potential, but it is still somewhat of a work in progress.

Healthcare facilities will need to properly socialize and monitor the rollout and implementation of ambient voice, but this is clearly a technology that has enormous potential to have a dramatic and positive effect on mitigating burnout and increasing capacity for our healthcare practitioners.

Attend this session at the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum scheduled to take place September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register.

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