I Just Saw My 3000th Patient Using AI. Here’s What the Future of Healthcare Looks Like

The perspectives in this article are my own and not necessarily those Carbon Health, although there is considerable overlap.

TL;DR

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare, making it more efficient and improving patient care. With 25 years of experience in clinical and healthtech roles, I've witnessed firsthand how AI is changing the game at Carbon Health. AI helps tackle physician shortages, speeds up care, boosts diagnostic accuracy, personalizes care, and optimizes resources. By handling both complex and routine tasks, AI frees up clinicians to focus more on their patients. As we continue integrating AI, it's crucial to ensure it enhances the human touch that patients appreciate, rather than replacing it.

I Just Saw My 3000th Patient Using AI. Here’s What the Future of Healthcare Looks Like

I recently treated my 3,000th patient using AI, and its impact has been nothing short of stunning. With 15 years in care delivery and hospital leadership, followed by a decade on the product and commercial sides of healthtech, my current role at Carbon Health uniquely combines both experiences. At Carbon Health, we're pioneering AI to enhance patient care. From automating administrative tasks to providing clinical decision support, AI is revolutionizing how we deliver healthcare in surprising ways.

The AI Advantage

At Carbon, where I manage several clinics and work on the front lines, we've pioneered extensive AI use in healthcare. To my knowledge, we are the largest medical group globally leveraging AI to this extent. This unique position has given me valuable insights into the future of healthcare, and we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible. Here’s where we are now and where I think we’ll be soon.

Current State: AI as a Time-Saver

When I sit down with a patient, AI technology is activated. Regardless of how complex the patient’s history is or how diverse their accents are, AI produces stellar, detailed notes almost instantly. There’s no need to type anything, and the quality of the documentation surpasses what I could achieve if I had 30 minutes to do it myself.

Future State: Enhancing Both ‘Halves’ of the Patient Encounter

A patient encounter can be divided into two parts. AI has already handled the first half and is working on the second one:

• The First Half: This involves the initial interaction with the patient. With AI, this process is seamless. The AI listens to the conversation and generates a comprehensive note, allowing me to focus more on patient care rather than paperwork. If you’re my patient, I’ll keep eye contact with you the entire visit and you feel heard. When I leave the exam room, a big cognitive load has been lifted from me because AI has already written my note, often catching details I missed.

• The Second Half: When I walk out of the exam room, I determine the patient’s diagnosis, order labs, x-rays, medications, and place specialist referrals. This is typically a cumbersome process with tons of clicks and shifting from one page to another, but AI is starting to streamline this. The potential is massive. By understanding the clinician-patient discussion it just summarized, AI can tap into a vast reservoir of clinical expertise to provide real-time recommendations on likely diagnoses, tests, and therapies, making the process much faster, more efficient, and accurate.

The Problems AI is Fixing in Healthcare

Stepping back, you can look at this differently: by naming the big problems in healthcare AI is fixing. Here are just 5 of them:

👨⚕️ Addressing the Physician Shortage:

Scaling Providers: AI can augment the capabilities of both physicians and mid-level providers, allowing them to handle more patients efficiently. With AI, tasks like initial patient assessments, documentation, and follow-up care can be streamlined, freeing up providers to connect with patients and better handle complex decision-making.

⏱️ Increasing the Speed of Care:

Efficiency Enhancements: By automating routine administrative tasks and providing clinical decision support, AI reduces the burden on healthcare providers, thus decreasing patient wait times. For example, AI is excellent at summarizing medical records, quickly sifting through and summarizing a patient's massive medical history, equipping clinicians with insights to provide better care today. Traditionally, this is a huge time-sink for clinicians, especially with complex or new patients. AI automates this process, cutting what could be a 30-minute process down to seconds, resulting in better patient care.

💰 Improving Profitability of Care Delivery:

Enhanced Throughput: AI-driven tools can scale clinicians, increasing the number of patients a provider can see in a day. This winter, some of my clinicians saw up to 70 often-complex patients/day, relying heavily on AI that's still in its early stages and focused on documentation. Leveraging AI beyond writing clinician notes, but for decision support and offloading diagnostics, could equip that same provider to manage 100 patients daily. This ensures more patients in our community receive timely care and enhances the clinic's profitability.

🧠 Enhancing Diagnostic Accuracy and Consistency:

Evidence-Based Treatments: AI analyzes vast amounts of medical data to identify the most effective, evidence-based treatments for various conditions. This helps standardize care across different providers, reducing variability and improving outcomes. I often use OpenEvidence, which is like ChatGPT for clinicians. It's free and provides instant, evidence-backed recommendations, even for complex cases. This AI application, seamlessly integrated into the EMR, could make any clinician much smarter and faster.

🔄 Optimizing Resource Allocation:

Operational Efficiency: AI can analyze clinic operations to optimize scheduling, staffing, and resource allocation, ensuring that clinics operate efficiently with minimal downtime and optimal utilization of healthcare providers.

Supply Chain Management: AI forecasts demand for medical supplies and medications, ensuring that clinics are well-stocked and reducing the risk of shortages.

Wrap-up

Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize healthcare by tackling major challenges like provider shortages, inefficiencies in care delivery, and inconsistent diagnoses. With AI, we can speed up, improve the accuracy, and personalize patient care, leading to better outcomes and a more sustainable healthcare system. But as we bring AI into clinical practice, it's crucial to keep the human touch that patients care about. Technology should be a tool to enhance, not replace, the vital role of healthcare providers. Patients want to feel heard and cared for, and AI helps us preserve that by taking over the technical tasks.

At Carbon Health, we've received thousands of fantastic patient reviews. And you know what? None of them mention our tech—they talk about how we made them feel.