27% of Health Systems Turn to AI to Ease Workload

America’s major hospital systems are becoming a testing ground for widespread artificial intelligence (AI) adoption.

That’s according to a report Monday (Jan. 5) by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which notes that these health centers are seeing what AI can do, but also showing where it falls short, in some cases through disturbing errors.

A little more than a quarter of health systems (27%) are now paying for commercial AI licenses, a figure that’s triple the rate across the U.S. economy, the report said, citing a recent survey by Menlo Ventures and Morning Consult.

According to the report, AI use is particularly prominent for labor-intensive tasks that hospitals deal with each day, such as dealing with insurance claims or taking notes.

The report cites the example of Samir Abboud, chief of emergency radiology for Northwestern Medicine, who uses AI to review X-ray reports. While he said humans remain a necessary component of the process, he acknowledged the benefits of being able to read scans faster.

“You’d feel guilty getting up to use the restroom,” Abboud said. “There’s hundreds of patients waiting for our read, and any one of them could be one that’s actively dying.”

At the same time, there are limits to what AI can do for doctors, the WSJ added. For example, Mayo Clinic cardiologist Paul A. Friedman used ChatGPT to get more information on a defibrillator implantation.

The chatbot offered references to reports from medical journals showing the procedure was “safe and effective.” However, one of his colleagues tried looking for the studies only to find they were entirely fabricated. The experience has led Friedman to adopt a “trust but verify” approach.

“It’s not that I don’t ask ChatGPT medical questions but, when I do, I always look for the references, click on them and read the abstracts at a minimum,” he said.

As covered here last year, research shows that close to half of healthcare and life-sciences organizations have generative AI in production use, in many cases for documentation, administrative work and early-stage clinical summaries.

And upwards of half of doctors surveyed by the American Medical Association said that AI tools could meaningfully support core clinical functions.

“Among respondents, 72% said AI could improve diagnostic ability, 62% said it could enhance clinical outcomes and 59% said it could strengthen care coordination,” PYMNTS wrote last month in a report on artificial intelligence use in the health field.