Can Artificial Intelligence Reduce Healthcare Burnout?

Burnout in the healthcare industry is real—but can targeted artificial intelligence solutions reduce burnout?

In a LinkedIn post, healthcare company Artisight references an Advisory Board article with the following statistics:

(T)here were 7,887 nurses who recently ended their healthcare careers between 2018 and 2021….39% of respondents said their decision to leave healthcare was due to a planned retirement. However, 26% of respondents cited burnout or emotional exhaustion, and 21% cited insufficient staffing.

And this is ALL nurses. Not just the forensic nurses who have to deal with upsetting examinations that (literally) probe into sexual assault and child abuse. All nurses have it tough.

But the Artisight LinkedIn post continues with the following assertion:

At Artisight we are committed to reversing this trend through AI-driven technology that is bringing the joy back to medicine!!

Can artificial intelligence bots truly relieve the exhaustion of overworked health professionals? Let’s look at two AI solutions from 3M and Artisight and see whether they truly benefit medical staff.

3M and documentation solutions

3M. From mining and manufacturing to note-taking, biometrics, and artificial intelligence. By McGhiever – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51409624

3M, a former competitor to MorphoTrak until 3M sold its biometric offerings (as did MorphoTrak’s parent Safran), has invested heavily into healthcare artificial intelligence solutions. This includes a solution that addresses the bane of medical professionals everywhere—keeping up with the paperwork (and checking for potentially catastrophic errors).

Our solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) to alleviate administrative burden and proactively identify gaps and inconsistencies within clinical documentation. Supporting completeness and accuracy every step of the way, from capture to code, means rework doesn’t end up on the physician’s plate before or even after discharge. That enables you to keep your focus where it needs to be – on the patient right in front of you.

Artisight and “smart hospitals”

But what about Artisight, whose assertion inspired this post in the first place?

A recent PYMNTS article interviewed Artisight President Stephanie Lahr to uncover Artight’s approach.

The Artisight platform marries IoT sensors with machine learning and large language models. The overall goal in a hospital setting is to streamline safe patient care, including virtual nursing. Compliance with HIPAA, according to Lahr, has been an important part of the platform’s development, which includes computer vision, voice recognition, vital sign monitoring, indoor positioning capabilities and actionable analytics reports.

In more detail, a hospital patient room is equipped with Al-powered devices such as high-quality, two-way audio and video with multiple participants for virtual care. Ultra-wideband technology tracks the movement and flow of assets throughout the hospital. Remote nurses and observers monitor patient room activity off-site and interact virtually with patients and clinicians.

At a minimum, this reduces the need for nurses to run down the hall just to check things. At a maximum, tracking of asset flows and actionable analytics reports make the job of everyone in the hospital easier.

What about the benefits?

As Bredemarket blog readers have heard ad nauseum, simply saying that your health solution uses features such as artificial intelligence makes no difference to the medical facility. The facility doesn’t care about your features or your product—it only cares about what benefits them. (Cool feature? So what?)

By Mindaugas Danys from Vilnius, Lithuania, Lithuania – scream and shout, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44907034.

So how can 3M’s and Artisight’s artificial intelligence offerings benefit medical facilities?

  • Allow medical professionals to concentrate on care. Patients don’t need medical professionals who are buried in paperwork. Patients need medical professionals who are spending time with them. The circumstances that land a patient in a hospital are bad enough, and to have people who are forced to ignore patient needs makes it worse. Maybe some day we’ll even get back to Welbycare.
  • Free medical professionals from routine tasks. Assuming the solutions work as advertised, they eliminate the need to double-check a report for errors, or the need to walk down the hall to capture vital signs.
  • Save lives. Yeah, medical professionals do that. If the Marcus Welby AI bot spots an error in a report, or if the bot detects a negative change in vital signs while a nurse is occupied with another patient, the technology could very well save a life.
I’m old enough to remember Welbycare. Robert Young (“Marcus Welby”) and Jane Wyatt (“Margaret Anderson” on a different show). By ABC Television. Public Domain,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16472486

Now I am not a doctor and cannot evaluate whether these artificial intelligence solutions actually work (unlike some other so-called artificial intelligence solutions that were in reality powered manually). But if the solutions truly work, wonderful.

What’s YOUR healthcare story? And who can tell your story?

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