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 Today in Health IT, we're discussing the potential for AI to help alleviate burnout among women physicians. This episode is brought to you by SureTest. Transform your health system's application testing and reclaim thousands of hours with SureTest.

Visit ThisWeekHealth. com backslash SureTest today. My name is Kate Gamble. I'm Managing Editor at This Week Health, where we host a set of channels and events dedicated to transforming healthcare for women. One connection at a time. I've spent the last 12 years interviewing CIOs, and I'm excited to bring that knowledge into this community of leaders.

Today, we're discussing how AI can combat burnout among women physicians. And I'm joined by Sarah Richardson, President of This Week Health 229 Executive Development Community. Sarah, welcome to the show. Hello, Kate. This should be interesting. There's a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that 54 percent of women physicians experience burnout compared to 42 percent of men, which is really eye opening.

It found that women spend more time on administrative tasks, including EHR management. More time doing work during non scheduled hours at pajama time. And you can see how this affects productivity as well as morale, but this is where AI can potentially come in with things like in basket management and clinical documentation.

So based on your experience as a CIO and your discussions with other leaders, what are some of the things you've heard about how AI is being used in this space? Your timing, Kate, could not be more perfect because I just came back from a major conference with one of our partners who very specifically talks about this in general.

I did find the burnout comparison between men and women to be interesting, especially with that big of a difference in the rate of burnout. And yet so many of the administrative burden activities that are Being a physician, whether that is chart prep, whether that is summarizing your notes, whether that is making sure the documentation is complete in the way that you would want it, all of those things can be automated as part of the process.

So imagine having a solution that goes and reviews everything that you're going to need for your next day's patients in summaries that you know that you can validate and trust. So it's already ready for you and you don't have to do all of that work yourself. And then throughout your visit with your patient, you've got ambient listening that can then transcribe the notes to make sure you've got everything right.

You go and you review those. And then also through all those pieces, it's helping with coding. It's helping with the entire flow of that encounter. And then you come back to, Oh my gosh, I have all of these messages in my in basket. Yes, your team can help you with that as well. The same time, a lot of those in basket tasks can be automated also.

And so it's not replacing humans with bots or AI technology or augmented. It's actually enhancing the capabilities of the workflows so that additional tasks can also be performed. That to me is fascinating because Too many people worry that AI is going to take their jobs. And in fact, a lot of the research that we're seeing from our partners and from other spaces say that the ability to almost increase the FTE capacity because bots are filling open recs.

So the average facility can have over 200 open administrative recs for things that help with workflows in the hospital. And if you can automate those. What you're actually doing is closing open recs that you were having a hard time filling anyway, and allowing people to practice at a higher level of capability that's for licensed clinicians, as much as it is for potentially the front desk staff as well.

Yeah. A lot of really interesting things there. And you touched on in basket management, which is. Is, I think, it seems like that's a point where a lot of organizations might start. They might start there and then progress to different levels with AI. Is that something that you've seen? It is because you have to start where you're most comfortable with automating a specific process.

And it was interesting, one of the keynote speakers at this conference I just attended said we turned on the in basket we basically said, here's your portal, use it for these things. Oh, and by the way, you can message your doctor now. And. That was put into place without understanding, oh my gosh, this is a 24 7 operation now.

You can message your doctor all of the time who is going to answer those messages. And so as you think about where are the biggest bottlenecks, where do you feel like you cannot keep up or what is creating that quote unquote extra time after the visit or that pajama time truly in the evening, we as practitioners of technology tend to go and answer our email at night.

The difference is no matter how busy my day is, I'm not taking care of a panel of 15 to 20 patients and then having to go back and finish the rest of the tasks that have come in that day. And so being able to reduce that burden for a clinician so that they are the best version of themselves when they fully engaged with you, fully engaged in the capability to have a conversation with you about your care, That is the game changer and so you have to start with the automation in a place that people feel most comfortable about what its intent and focus is going to be and then you continue to add on from there.

One of the notes I heard yesterday that I loved was land and expand in any endeavor. Land the plane, let's just say with inbox management or these task management and then continue to expand the capabilities and choose a partner that can do that because what you don't want to do. is clog your system with five or six different point solutions.

And I get point solutions were quite the rage when a lot of these, like I need to solve for this, and this, you now have platforms. that integrate with your EHR that you can do that with today. So start where you're comfortable and then land and expand your capability to alleviate burnout and improve satisfaction and retention through different technologies that can reduce administrative overload, especially within the EHR management.

Land and expand. I like that. Might be using that going forward. Then when you look into ambient listening, obviously there are some concerns that need to be addressed. There's always going to be a concern when you are allowing something to be automated. How do you prove that it is correct?

And we often hear it needs to be 100 percent correct because it's the technology doing the work. The thing is, humans are often not 100 percent correct. And these were lauded physicians. Sharing this perspective on stage and saying, determine what point for you in your organization that the human and the computer find common ground.

Understand what that is for your facility. There's not a perfect formula for any organization, except what works within their culture and making sure that, and you do engage the human in the loop, that it is something that they are comfortable being accountable for. And so, many different perspectives of ambient listening or bot management as we automate some of these tools and tasks is the expectation that the computer is 100 percent correct.

The human's not 100 percent correct. And what is your risk tolerance within your organization? What I appreciate about our more seasoned partners is they can have this conversation with you in a way that not only provides complete data transparency. What are the workload differences? How do we help address inequities more effectively?

But also the resource allocation component., is it equally distributed? Can it prevent deepening disparities across different healthcare settings? And is it truly reducing the burden on whomever is required to perform that set of tasks? And I don't think we can talk about anything without security coming into the picture, which, and it, which makes sense.

It has to be the case. But there are, of course, privacy and security concerns with ambient listening. And I guess that's something that just has to continue to be top of mind. It absolutely is. You think about the ambient listening component, you think about the automation of the tasks and where are you sourcing your LLM material?

How are you verifying the quality and accuracy and absorbing and thinking about the risk factors that go into that? Because truly, when you think about AI and automation, if it's going to reduce administrative tasks like EHR management, patient communication, which in this case, despite the Is

it

creating mentorship and leadership opportunities within your organization?

Can you promote gender equity? and create leadership pathways for female physicians or female clinicians that also help alleviate burnout from things like patient documentation, inbox management, and also support mental health through wellness initiatives that address burnout and stress simply by involving them in the conversations and the change management and the deployment of these tools with their environment.

A component of that includes cyber. When holistically, Like anything, a physician wants to see the full picture of their patient. That's not going to be significantly different for the technologist wanting to see the whole picture of what this environment looks like as it serves patients and clinicians.

When you bring those elements together, the most powerful relationships I've ever had in deploying technology and clinical solutions in facilities is with the physicians and the nurses. Leading They are leading the effort and leading the charge because they could trust the technology and the security behind it.

And they felt comfortable having those tools support their patients and their workflows. Yeah. So, much has to Go into this, has to be done intentionally and there are risks, of course, but the end game, we're looking at something that can improve retention, improve satisfaction, and then as a result, improve patient care.

So really, I think, I feel like there's a lot of pluses here, but again, we have to, it has to be approached intentionally and we have to always keep our eye on those, details. We do, and what I will always say, even though I appreciate that with the next 20 years being the largest influx of senior patients that we will see and planning for that capacity, the intent of some of these tools and capabilities is not just to increase the panel size without appreciating how the technologist or the technologies can be supportive in those spaces, inclusive of automation.

So if you go to a doctor and you say. Dr. Gamble, guess what? I have all these new technologies. They are not only going to help reduce your administrative burnout and give you more time at home, but it's going to increase your panel size by a 100%. You will look at me like I am crazy, and that you don't want to be a part of that solution until incrementalism and the combined effort of understanding the adoption of what this is going to mean for the organization is something that you're comfortable with.

So every single solution. Regardless of its intent, it's going to have things around it that need to be considered as well. This is not something you go into lightly, and it's something you do a ton of research and a lot of collaboration internally to make sure it's the right thing for your patients and your doctors.

So I love that all of these tools are available to us. We also have to be very responsible in how we utilize them so we don't create a different problem. The solutions we're bringing to the table. Yeah that's a great way to, to wrap it up. It's, this is very exciting. And we will, as always keep our eye on it, see how it develops.

Please remember to share this podcast with a friend or colleague. Use it as foundation for daily or weekly discussions on the topics that are relevant to you and the industry. They can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me. And everyone else, thank you for listening.

Have a great day.