Delivering healthcare effectively is becoming more challenging for clinical staff. The stress of treating patients, along with the pressure to complete increasingly complex tasks with fewer resources, is causing many clinicians to leave the profession at an unsustainable rate. To address this issue and reduce the turnover of essential frontline staff, health system leaders are investing in technologies that streamline clinical processes. These technologies enable clinicians to concentrate more on patient care rather than administrative tasks.
Generative AI, for example, has great potential to help system leaders address clinician burnout, improve personalized care, and reduce the cost of healthcare delivery. Effective, patient-centered healthcare is driven by data—and lots of it. Generative AI solutions can analyze enormous amounts of clinical and operational data, creating entirely new sets of actionable insights. These unique data sets can help hospital IT staff and their solutions partners implement effective data systems quickly and securely and develop applications to reduce manual processes, streamline recordkeeping, and improve communication to deliver personalized and affordable care.
Helping clinicians thrive with timely AI
Working in healthcare is more demanding than ever due to factors such as labor shortages and rising patient demand. Clinician burnout is a growing issue, both for providers and for patients seeking access to quality care.
The health system leadership that Microsoft has engaged with recently expressed deep concern about this issue, citing the negative impact of high labor costs and rapid turnover. One thing shared by stakeholders across the continuum of care is their desire to institute meaningful change. Healthcare providers are turning to the industry’s technology partners to explore AI-powered solutions that address clinician burnout while maintaining strong compliance and security standards to protect sensitive patient data.
Generative AI analytics can reveal what tasks take the most amount of time. Equipped with this data, administrators can deploy the right resources and reduce the burden on clinicians, freeing them to focus on delivering better, more personalized care. For example, capturing additional patient information needed by a payer for a specific procedure can take extra time. Here, automation substantially expedites the process while supporting the accuracy, integrity, and security of the data being collected.
In another example, healthcare technology company Medtronic used AI-powered automation to streamline repetitive tasks, like data quality checks, ultimately automating more than 240,000 hours of work using AI. From identifying critical areas of patient support to improving the efficiency and accuracy of recordkeeping and routine clinical tasks, generative AI can assess workforce needs and deliver the bandwidth and resources administrators need to effectively address clinician burnout.
Empowering personalized care with AI
Patients deserve to receive quality care that is tailored to their unique needs. Personalized care not only creates better health outcomes, but it also promotes stronger connections between clinicians and patients. Yet the complexity of hospital operations, disparate data sources, and staffing issues often makes such connections difficult.
Legacy systems and processes present obstacles to providers and clinicians seeking to connect with patients more meaningfully. As a result, providers are turning to generative AI-supported solutions to improve patients’ understanding of their care and enhance the value of their feedback—both of which are to ensure that patients have the right support at the right time and with the right person. Generative AI can combine data from multiple systems and departments to create personalized patient journeys. And with enhanced collaboration and AI-powered automation, care teams can focus on improving patient outcomes.
In Medtronic’s case, the company created a unified analytics solution that lets every employee see the same data and uses AI to generate insights and enrich analytics. This supports the company’s ability to deliver great service to customers and optimize its supply chain.
The complexity and scope of healthcare operations can lead administrators to feel disconnected from what is happening clinically and across the business. Although it might feel as though there will never be enough resources to gain the clarity that operational excellence demands, AI-generated analytics have the power to help health system leadership deliver better data and improved patient outcomes.
Generative AI makes it possible to streamline critical processes, deliver better experiences internally, and empower clinicians to focus on patient care. Operational excellence is the key to delivering affordable healthcare, and with the right resources and technologies, healthcare providers can deliver the quality care that patients expect.
Transforming healthcare and the future of patient care with generative AI
Hospital administrators and clinicians understand the need for a robust digital ecosystem to deliver better operational and patient outcomes. Microsoft, the Microsoft Cloud, and its extensive network of technology partners offer unique, flexible, and advanced generative-AI solutions the healthcare industry needs to take full advantage of its data ecosystems.
Read this Microsoft white paper to learn more about how to unlock the potential of generative AI.
