Axios Event: AI can help address health care workforce gaps, leaders say

WASHINGTON – AI can be applied to help health care workers interact more with patients and spend less time on administrative tasks like shift management, leaders said at a roundtable discussion at Axios' inaugural Future of Health Summit on May 14.

• Axios' Maya Goldman and Erin Brodwin moderated the discussion, which was sponsored by Adtalem Global Education. Opening remarks were given by Adtalem chairman and CEO Steve Beard.

What they're saying: "We've really been looking a lot at all AI use and the impact on burden. And while the studies have been mixed, what we're seeing on the ground is subjective reduction of burden, even if there is not objective time reduction," said Sarah Corley, who serves as the MITRE Corporation's chief medical adviser and also works with the American Medical Informatics Association.

• "Most of it is with the ambient listening right now, although we have a fair number of users of Epic that have been using some of the preliminary message responses, and have found that that's helping."
• Clinicians are feeling like they're spending less time on documentation and more time engaging with patients, she said.

Zoom in: Data has shown that if health care providers did everything asked of them from a preventative care standpoint, they'd have a workday lasting 26 hours, said Kim Blake, vice president at consulting firm Padilla.

• "The organizations that we're working with are integrating AI in order to take care of the things that health providers know they need to do but it's really impossible for them to fit into their workday … it's really reducing that burden," Blake said.

The bottom line: "I think that ambient AI is a low-hanging fruit," but workforce AI is evolving into more regimented areas, said Jacob Laufer, chief operating officer at ShiftMed.

• The workforce gaps across the board are well-documented, he said, and AI can provide more infrastructure for shift management.
• "About 65% of unit managers and leaders on the floor are actually spending about 65% of their time on staffing and scheduling. … There's no reason that the unit manager should be doing that."