Dive Brief:
- Community Health Systems has migrated to a new clinical data platform that will allow the hospital operator to deploy generative artificial intelligence technologies with Google Cloud, the for-profit announced Wednesday.
- The new cloud platform, which uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources data standard, will speed adoption of generative AI tools that CHS providers and workers can use to analyze and interpret data, like “near-real time dashboards” for tracking surgical and emergency room operations.
- The for-profit operator also wants to deploy generative AI technologies for clinical documentation, automating administrative tasks like creating denial appeals letters and generating lists of local social determinants of health resources for discharged patients.
Dive Insight:
Interest in generative AI products, which can create new content like images or text, reached a fever pitch last year as tech giants like Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Google touted their own products they say will lessen the workloads of overwhelmed providers.
Many tools are geared toward clinical documentation, or automatically drafting notes for conversations between doctors and patients. Providers have said they spend multiple hours per day on electronic health record-related administrative tasks, which sometimes stretch into after-work hours.
But the products can be used for a wider range of healthcare tasks. Late last year, Google revealed a new group of generative AI foundation models that the tech giant said were “fine-tuned” for work like documentation, pre-clinical research for drug development and helping health plan members find providers through a chatbot.
A study published in npj Digital Medicine this month found large language models could pull social determinants of health data, like housing or employment status, from clinician notes to determine who might need additional support.
CHS, which operates 71 hospitals across 15 states, said it previously had data stored in multiple locations and formats, which made it challenging and time consuming to access. The Google Cloud platform allows the operator to collect its information in the FHIR standard, or rules for exchanging electronic health data, and more easily view patient and operational data, CHS said.
“The goal of this migration extends well beyond modernizing our data infrastructure,” Miguel Benet, CHS’ senior vice president of clinical operations, said in a statement.
A number of healthcare organizations are looking to implement generative AI tools within the next year, especially tools geared toward operational efficiency, according to a survey published in December from Klas Research.
Even though more than half of the respondents said they’d like to adopt the products soon, executives still reported some concerns about generative AI, like challenges around accuracy and reliability as well as cost and privacy worries.
