Is Your Practice Ready for Medical AI?

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Artificial Intelligence is rapidly evolving, transforming industries and revolutionizing the way we work, live, and prepare for the future. Healthcare is no exception to this trend, and the applications of AI in medicine are becoming more and more prevalent. From diagnostic algorithms to predictive models and medical decision-making, the potential of medical AI is vast. But with this highly advanced technology evolving at a rapid pace it's important to consider the ethical concerns surrounding its use. With data security threats, the potential for biased algorithms, and the lack of transparency in how AI systems make decisions, it is crucial to ask: Is your practice ready for medical AI?

In this article, we will explore the benefits and challenges of using AI in medicine and offer practical guidance for healthcare professionals who are considering integrating this technology into their practices.

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Factors to Consider When Assessing Medical AI Solutions for Your Practice

When assessing medical AI solutions for your practice, there are several categories that should be taken into consideration.

Product Effectiveness

Assessing product effectiveness is perhaps the first, most important question to ask when deciding if your practice is ready for medical AI. Simply put: does the medical AI solution work? Moreover, has it been tested for usability and accuracy? Is it specific enough to your practice and sensitive enough to the patients you serve? Without an effective product, your practice will not see the benefits of adopting medical AI.

Data Infrastructure

Medical AI, in almost every single instance, needs structured and unstructured data to run as intended. To leverage medical AI in a way that benefits your practice, you must consider the quality, quantity, and, most importantly, accessibility of your practice's data. If valuable data that medical AI can leverage is siloed or inaccessible, your practice won't be able to properly leverage the benefits of an AI solution. That being said, for many practices, this is as simple as ensuring the electronic health record platform your team uses can be integrated with the AI.

Technical Expertise

It is important to consider the technical expertise and knowledge needed to implement and maintain medical AI in your practice. How tech-savvy does your team of clinicians need to be to maximize the AI solution? Is it easy to use? How much training is needed to use it? If it's complicated, can adoption be handled in-house or are additional resources needed? If this technical expertise is not at the disposal of your practice, consider adopting a medical AI solution that is proven to be user-friendly and scalable.

Workflow Integration and Adoption

Workflow integration refers to the ability of the AI solution to seamlessly integrate with your practice's existing workflow and electronic health record (EHR) system. It is important to ensure that the AI solution does not dramatically disrupt existing workflows and can be easily integrated into your practice's existing EHR system. If it can't be integrated easily, what are the hurdles, how daunting are they, and what is the cost of clearing them? How do integration and adoption affect workplace morale and your practice's bottom line? AI in general is designed to improve efficiency, so if integrating medical AI in your practice is shaping up to be a burden, then consider medical AI solutions that are targeted at your practice's biggest pain points to ensure value and ROI.

Patient Privacy, Data Security, and Ethics

Patient privacy, data security, and ethics are one of the most important categories when considering if your practice is ready for medical AI. Here, the question is less about if your practice is ready for medical AI, and more about if medical AI is ready for your practice. Any concerns regarding patient privacy, data security, or ethics, should be taken very seriously. Your practice can't afford to take risks or adopt technology that has holes in its security. Does the medical AI comply with relevant privacy regulations and ethical guidelines? Is it HIPAA compliant? What fail-stops are in place to protect patient information in the event of a leak? How is patient data stored? Additionally, is your clinical team prepared to communicate with patients regarding use of AI during encounters or other sensitive situations? These are just a few very important questions to ask when considering adopting medical AI at your practice.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability of the medical AI solution to accommodate the growing needs of your practice, such as an increase (or decrease) in the size of your clinical team, patient panel size fluctuation, or expansion to new locations. Ensuring that AI solutions can be easily scaled to meet your practice's current and future needs is an essential element of adoption. Can the entire clinical team use the solution? What flexibility does my practice have in using the solution? Does an increase in adoption make the solution more cost-effective? Scalability is one of medical AI's biggest opportunities. When considering if your practice is ready for medical AI, it's important to consider how prepared your team is to scale the solution to the right groups.

Cost and Return on Investment

Medical AI solutions aren't free. When considering if your practice is ready for medical AI, it's important to consider the implementation costs, maintenance costs, and monthly costs, as well as how the AI solution may positively impact your providers, your patients, and your practice as a whole.

Regardless of price, your practice should consider what benefits medical AI can bring to providers and patients, both qualitatively (work-life balance, reduced burnout, improved patient satisfaction) and quantitatively (increased reimbursement, improved patient outcomes). It's important to remember that return on investment may show itself in multiple areas.

By taking these categories into consideration, your practice can make an informed decision about which medical AI solution is best suited to meet your specific needs and requirements.

Proven Solutions vs. Future Applications: Introducing DeepScribe

With so much commotion around the possibilities of AI, it's easy to get wrapped up in the future applications of the technology. It's important to remember that even if your practice is ready for medical AI, future applications like those that leverage genome data and AI in predictive health may not be ready for use in clinical practice. It's important to stay focused on the proven solutions while still being mindful and active participants in the conversations and development of future solutions. Additionally, it's important to consider the biggest burdens that face your practice and search for AI solutions that augment those burdens and improve the health of your practice.

Those burdens, studies show, are workforce challenges (personnel shortages, burnout) and financial challenges (increasing labor costs, reimbursement shrinkage). Of available medical AI solutions, DeepScribe's AI-powered medical scribe is directly addressing these burdens in a proven, holistic way.

Using AI DeepScribe converts normal conversations between clinicians and patients into complete medical documentation. By capturing patient visits ambiently, DeepScribe allows clinicians to refocus on patient care without having to worry about taking notes, reducing the administrative burden and improving clinical outcomes. Combined with natural language processing models that are trained on millions of real patient encounters, DeepScribe simultaneously helps practices improve billing opportunities and maximize reimbursement.

Is your practice ready for DeepScribe's AI medical scribe? Let's see how it stacks up against the categories we discussed above.

Proven Effectiveness

DeepScribe is the world's most widely adopted AI medical scribe. With hundreds of providers on the platform and AI models that are trained on millions of real clinical conversations, DeepScribe provides an accurate and efficient AI solution that is proven to help clinicians reduce the documentation burden.

Data Infrastructure

Unlike other AI solutions on the market, DeepScribe seamlessly integrates with your practice's existing EHR system, minimizing data organization and required IT resources. DeepScribe's system takes previously unstructured, unlabeled data from patient encounters and organizes it in a secure way that can be used to train AI models, resulting in the continued improvement of the accuracy and efficiency of the solution.

Technical Expertise

One of the primary concerns for medical practices when adopting AI medical solutions is the level of technical expertise required to implement and maintain them. With DeepScribe's intuitive interface and user-friendly design, little-to-no technical expertise or advanced training is required to get started. With our streamlined onboarding, even those with minimal technical expertise can quickly and easily integrate DeepScribe into their practice. Additionally, technical support experts and dedicated customer success agents ensure that you're never in over your head.

Workflow Integration and Adoption

DeepScribe's seamless integration into clinical workflows sets it apart from other medical AI solutions. Rather than complicating clinical workflows and adding new steps, DeepScribe works to streamline them by eliminating the most time-consuming and burdensome steps. With just the tap of a button on the DeepScribe mobile app, natural conversations between clinicians and patients are captured, documented, and integrated directly into the appropriate fields of your EHR. Clinical teams can instead focus on providing the best possible patient care without ever worrying about taking notes during visits or documenting after hours.

Patient Privacy and Data Concerns

With so many new solutions on the market, it can sometimes be difficult to discern which medical AI companies are adopting the rigorous patient privacy and data security standards your practice requires. At DeepScribe, all data is handled with extreme care. Beyond being 100% HIPAA-compliant, DeepScribe dual encrypts patient data at every single point along its journey and de-identifies (the process of stripping data from identifying information) it so that it can never be traced back to the patient.

Scalability

DeepScribe's simple implementation and ease of use make it easily-scalable for practices of any size. From small family-owned practices to large healthcare organizations, DeepScribe's cloud-based solution is capable of meeting the needs of your entire team.

Cost and Return on Investment

DeepScribe offers inherent value to medical practices by automating documentation, improving coding accuracy, and maximizing reimbursement. With these benefits, clinicians are unburdened from documentation, enabling them to engage more holistically with patients while simultaneously producing more accurate, nuanced, and billable documentation that positively impacts your practice's bottom line (as much as $9k per month based on industry averages). Additionally, DeepScribe can save clinicians up to 3 hours per day, allowing them to see more patients without increasing their workload or contributing to burnout. By using a fraction of this new-found time to see as little as 1-2 additional patients per week, DeepScribe's medical AI can pay for itself.

In conclusion, AI holds great promise in healthcare, yet as we converse about its applications and ideate on how to build a more equitable, healthy future, it's important to not lose sight of how we can leverage medical AI to help the clinicians of today. Doing so helps ensure they'll be here tomorrow. Because tomorrow is looking pretty bright, too.

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