ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - Artificial Intelligence is set to have a greater presence in the Mercy Hospital system.
Mercy Hospital System is teaming up with Microsoft to use Artificial Intelligence to help the system's workers and patients better deal with a complicated healthcare system.
The hospital will begin using a type of A.I. called Generative A.I., which officials say is efficient at summarizing and serving up the next best actions for nurses and doctors.
Joe Kelly, Mercy's Executive Vice President of Transformation discussed the partnership and what patients can expect coming from it.
Kelly says that even though A.I. has proven already valuable in the medical field, it increased use does not mean it will replace the actual nurses or doctors in the hospital.
"This will never replace the expertise of our clinicians, of our doctors, of our nurses," said Kelly, "This is really intended to augment their ability to make the right decision for the patients that they're privileged to take care of."
"We really internally don't even refer to A.I. as artificial intelligence. We refer to it as augmented intelligence."
Kelly says a big goal for the system is to better increase efficiency, decrease work imperfections and ultimately, create a better patient experience with the use of A.I.
"We've identified kind of in three buckets (for where we can use A.I.): operational improvements, clinical improvements and then patient experience improvements," said Kelly, "What we're doing with Microsoft is identifying the ones that we believe have low risk to implement but a high impact to our coworkers, clinicians and our patients."
Kelly says the system has identified at least 50 ways for how the A.I. could be used in the daily activities for nurses and patients, such as using it to better summarize blood results for patients.
"Sometimes when patients get clinical documentation, they may be in perfect health, but they wouldn't know it from looking at the three page output," said Kelly, "So A.I. will come in and it can tell you 'Everything looks within the normal, but here's a couple of things you might want to keep an eye on. It suggest next time you have a meeting with your doctor, maybe you should talk about this.' It's just trying to simplify the complicated. Health care is complicated enough."