TUCSON, Ariz. – Can repairing people be a job for robots?
While we’re not quite at the level of Star Trek’s Emergency Medical Hologram or Big Hero Six’s Baymax, artificial intelligence is still making a difference in the medical field.
In Arizona, the Tucson Medical Center says it literally has AI in its corner.
“I like to think of AI as allowing us to be the best we can be as physicians,” said Dr. Josh Lee. He is the Senior Vice President of Tucson Medical Center and a practicing physician.
He says the TMC will have introduced artificial intelligence into their facilities around 2023, taking on three key roles in their practice: assistive, agentic and analytical.
“A good example is the way we assist our doctors at the bedside,” Lee said of their assistive AI.
Doctors and nurses use assistive AI in the form of an app on their phone. The app listens to conversations between patients and practitioners and adds relevant information to the patient’s medical file.
It has been a huge help to professionals like nurse Natalie Norem. She helped bring the tool to TMC.
“We have a lot of burnout in the medical field,” Norem said. “We don’t have enough nurses. We don’t have enough doctors. This is especially important in primary care.”
Especially in the coming years. Federal data shows that Arizona will likely face a shortage of primary care providers over the next decade. Norem says this deficit is (partly) attributed to burnout, but says this AI tool could help.
“Having technology to help me do that has only made my interactions with patients better,” Norem said, adding that it cut her data mapping time in half and increased her patient satisfaction scores.
With repeated use, she says it has improved “rapidly.”
TMC’s agentic AI takes a more behind-the-scenes approach, allowing doctors to focus on care.
“We are currently using (agentic AI) mainly in our revenue cycle,” Lee said. “It will perform a number of processes such as revoking an authorization without a human having to do it.”
Analytical AI is where Lee expects the most growth in the medical sector’s future.
“We’re trying to save lives as quickly as possible, so AI helps us more quickly identify those patients at highest risk,” he said.
The analytical AI technology works with large data sets from many years or multiple hospitals. This year, Lee says TMC is trying out a new analytical tool that pulls information from staff reports and patient characteristics to help shorten patients’ hospital stays.
“Every winter we have an overcrowded hospital, people waiting in the emergency room and desperately needing our care,” Lee said. “Getting through this safely, efficiently and effectively is a priority for all of us.”
But no matter how much technology improves and seeps into the medical world, Lee says human intelligence will persist in every AI interaction.
Especially because we are far from the age of robots like those in science fiction.
“I don’t think anyone is going to come and take our jobs with an AI nurse practitioner robot,” Norem said. “At least not now.”
