Renee Onque

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there has been a steady increase in the number of healthcare workers quitting their jobs. And though the industry is focused on hiring, the burden on the remaining doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals is still a heavy one.

“We have fewer and fewer people in healthcare. We saw a huge attrition of doctors and nurses post-Covid, and our patients and our community’s getting older,” says Nishit Patel, the vice president and chief medical informatics officer at Tampa General Hospital.

“The math doesn’t work unless you have something that can augment and turbo-charge our physicians or nurses and others to be even more accurate, even more efficient [and] drive costs down.”

Patel and other healthcare professionals believe that aid can come in the form of generative artificial intelligence, AI that turns user inputs into new content. At TGH, generative AI is already supporting nearly 300 physicians and providers, he told CNBC Make It in October.

Here are two uses of AI that physicians say are helping to lighten the load on healthcare workers and patients.

2 uses of AI that help reduce the burden on doctors, nurses and patients

1. To catch cases of sepsis early on

Sepsis is “the body’s extreme response to an infection,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The life-threatening condition is “the number one reason that someone might not come out of a hospital after they’re admitted,” Patel said.

By using generative AI, doctors at TGH have been able to spot early signs of sepsis more quickly, and create a step-by-step process that is easy to track for them to deliver “antibiotics within a certain time, the hanging of fluids, and all these things,” more effectively. It better supports healthcare workers and patients because “if something’s falling out of that one-hour timeline, we have a whole process to manage it,” he says.

Patel and his team have been able to “reduce our mortality rate in sepsis using these generative AI technologies by over 30%,” he told CNBC Make It late last year.

“If we can manage that type of transformation of care delivery, we are going to make healthcare far safer for every one of our patients.”

2. To transcribe patient notes in real time

Using ambient AI, which takes audio recordings and quickly transcribes them then structures the notes, can make charting easier for doctors, Patel said.

The service is basically a scribe that gives doctors the opportunity to “walk out with not a transcript, but an actual thoughtful, structured note shell that then I can tweak and edit around,” immediately after appointments, he said. This gives doctors more time with their patients, and cuts the time they spend charting.

LaTasha Seliby Perkins, a family physician at Georgetown University, was training to use generative AI for support with her charting when she spoke to Make It in October.

She expected some of her patients to be skeptical about the technology.

“I take care of baby boomers and the underserved,” Seliby Perkins said. “There is some mistrust in the medical system, as it should be for a lot of Black and brown patients, right? And so when you introduce something new, you have to definitely be mindful of that.”

Heading into the change, she decided that she would support any patient’s decision to opt out of having their appointments recorded using the service. “It’s okay to say no, that that’s not how you want your medical information managed,” Seliby Perkins said. “Express that.”

AI can be used by doctors ‘even in a fun way’

Dr. Nathaniel DeNicola didn’t use ambient AI in his practice when we spoke to him last year. The board-certified OB-GYN, who runs his own practice in southern California, hadn’t found a generative AI service for transcription that fit what his team was looking for, he said.

But when DeNicola and his wife were expecting their first baby last year, they were struggling to land on the perfect name for their daughter.

“We went through, I mean, hundreds of names through baby books, from social media influencers, from family, friends. We spent a lot of time thinking about it,” he said.

“At a visit with our OB, she was curious what the name was going to be. And she said, ‘Well, let’s see what ChatGPT says about it.’”

Their OB-GYN added parameters into the AI service based on the qualities the couple wanted in a name, and “ChatGPT came up with five names that were all high on our list, and were all pretty close to what we were looking at.”

AI can be used by doctors “even in a fun way,” to connect with patients, DeNicola said.

CNBC