Written by Rich Murphy, Product Director - iatricSystems
Last year we all saw the resiliency of the healthcare system and how flexible health systems can be — and have to be — in order to continue to protect patients during a troublesome time. Technology was more critical than ever to keep workflows moving and connections strong.
One major player last year was the rise of Artificial Intelligence within the healthcare sector. In an Intel survey, the proportion of health IT decision makers that had deployed, or were planning to deploy, AI jumped from 45% early in 2020 to 84% after the pandemic.
So, why were all of these organizations adopting this not-so-new technology at a rapid pace? Let’s dive into three ways Artificial Intelligence helps healthcare organizations support, enhance, and protect the patient experience.
1. Better Info, Better Care
The rise of big data within the healthcare industry has organizations collecting more and more information to ensure better care for their patients. The problem is, that while all this information is available, analyzing it is a new frontier.
Artificial Intelligence eases some of the workload by discovering patterns within patient data sets that can facilitate better decision making for clinicians. AI technology is already helping doctors in data-intensive specialties like radiology, pathology and ophthalmology to overcome research obstacles and provide a full understanding of a patient’s health.
Nurses can also leverage artificial intelligence to determine how long a patient should stay in the hospital, streamlining care planning and management to prevent complications and reduce costly readmissions.
2. Automating for Happier, More Product Physicians
According to Mayo Clinic, 96% of medical professionals agree that physician burnout is a real issue that must be addressed. Another recent study revealed that today’s physicians spend 40% of their workday on EHR.
When you add up the repetitive and tedious tasks, researching diagnoses and analyzing patient data, matched with administrative and EHR complexities, of course, physician burnout is at an all-time high. The reality is that providers are spending more time documenting than seeing their patients, poorly impacting both the physicians and the patients.
Artificial Intelligence empowers clinicians by streamlining data entry, data discovery and simple sorting tasks so they can spend more time connecting with their patients. Some hospitals have already implemented the technology to leverage natural language processing to translate clinical notes in EHRs to reduce the data entry redundancy.
3. Spotting and Stopping Suspicious Behavior
Last year, the healthcare industry saw an increase in cyber breaches, and often insider snooping was prevalent, with 11 hospitals and healthcare systems reporting breaches of inappropriate access of thousands of patients’ information.
It’s nearly impossible for a healthcare organization’s privacy team to track and spot suspicious behavior until it’s too late. Some malicious employees had been wrongly viewing patient records for years before they were spotted and terminated.
With so many PHI interactions between staff and patients, it’s difficult for a person to recognize normal behavior vs. anomalous behavior. Healthcare organizations are leveraging Artificial Intelligence’s ability to make connections and identify patterns within data to proactively detect abnormal behavior as it’s happening and prevent breaches.
Implement Artificial Intelligence Today
At iatricSystems, we realize the power of Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, how it impacts the future of patient privacy monitoring, that’s why we made sure to include artificial intelligence and machine learning into our latest privacy monitoring solution – Haystack iS. The goal of Haystack iS was not only to spot suspicious activity but also to streamline your privacy team's workflows so they can instead focus on more strategic privacy and security initiatives.
Knowing whether or not a user is connected with a patient through family ties, a neighbor, celebrity, or even via social media would be extremely difficult – and tedious – for a privacy expert to realize. But with the power of Artificial Intelligence, it’s as easy as scrolling through a data set and relieves that effort from the privacy team while increasing the amount of security provided to patients.
Want to learn more? Watch the Haystack iS video or contact us at info@iatric.com with any questions.
