(WXMI) — Artificial intelligence is all around us. From our devices to your cars to now, thousands of physicians at Corewell Health will have it as a new tool at their disposal.
AI can now be inside the room with patients and their doctor.
What's clear is, whether it's in your phone or the hospital, AI is an inevitability if not already in practice.
"It's kind of like, when are people signing up for it, not if they're doing it or not," said chief medical officer of True Women's Health, Dr. Diana Bitner.
AI is one of the latest innovations they hope can help.
Corewell Health just announced AI will now be alongside the patient-clinician conversation.
"It really just helps organize that conversation into a format that works really well for our medical record, and saves the time on the part of the provider," explained Chief Digital and Information Officer for Corewell Health, Jason Joseph.
The program is Abridge and will listen to and summarize patient-provider conversations and generate necessary documentation.
Corewell expects the hours saved on paperwork can now be directed back to the patient.
They also hope to avoiding physician burnout.
Doctors will often only spend 12 minutes with a patient but hours afterward, even time at home, on administrative paperwork that AI could have helped with.
The new tech is now available at 21 Corewell hospitals and more than 300 outpatient locations.
"It's a good thing ... it's great," added Dr. Bitner. "They're doing it. We're all doing it. It's a wave of the future."
Artificial intelligence is used in a number of professional fields including news. Many reporters use it to transcribe long interviews. The responsibility comes in when making sure that what it writes down is accurate.
"That is why we have that human in the loop process," said Joseph. "So it is absolutely a requirement that the physician afterwards reads that summary and makes sure it's accurate before anything gets finalized or sent out."
That assurance may not be enough for some. The core of the conversation surrounding AI has alwasy included apprehension.
"They might not be as forthcoming in the discussion as they might be if it wasn't recorded," said director of cyber security and data science at Ferris State University, Greg Gogolin. "In that sense, to me, that might be one of the most significant pitfalls."
Dr. Greg Gogolin is the director of Cyber Security and Data Science at Ferris State University. AI gets his name wrong, and he says it may have catching up to do on medical terms.
"That technology has been advancing so quickly, though, and if you train on a lot of medical information, a lot of that kind of takes care of itself," says Dr. Gogolin.
Corewell patients can decline its use. If approved, all they may notice is a phone or listening device recording.
"That's about all they're aware of,” Dr. Gogolin explains. “What they're probably going to notice is that, ‘Wow, my physician was having a lot more of a conversation and just focused on me and wasn't looking at the computer.’
"When providers can have a bit more time and space and not that burden of typing constantly while the patient's talking then and again, it frees them up to do what they love to do."
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