AI is helping doctors avoid burnout by offloading hours of documentation per day

A doctor's job is not limited to medical examinations and surgeries, but it is necessary to create a huge amount of documents such as reports, treatment plans, and bills based on patient medical records and electronic medical records. As a result, doctors are deprived of a lot of time by desk work more than medical practice, and they may end up having a big mental burden. Therefore, in order to help doctors avoid burnout syndrome , attempts are being made to automate the document creation work of doctors with generative AI technology.

AI May Someday Work Medical Miracles. For Now, It Helps Do Paperwork. - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/technology/ai-health-care-documentation.html

According to a study published by the American Medical Association (AMA) in March 2023, 63% of American doctors reported symptoms of burnout by the end of 2021. Regarding the growing number of physicians complaining of burnout, the AMA said, ``Many factors contribute to burnout, but its prevalence is driven by system inefficiencies, administrative burdens, regulations, and increasing technology requirements. are relevant: physicians need support, institutional reform and burden relief.'

In particular, for primary care doctors who are in charge of medical care for local residents, regardless of age or gender, creating electronic medical records is one of the tasks that puts pressure on doctors outside of consultation hours, and places a heavy burden on doctors.

Therefore, medical tools that incorporate generative AI such as ChatGPT are being developed. For example, Abridge , founded by Dr. Shivdev Rao, a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, uses generative AI to automate medical paperwork and is used by more than 1,000 physicians at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital. That's what I'm talking about. Abridge's AI tools automatically generate reports and invoices by simply recording conversations with patients on their smartphones.

In addition, Abridge's AI tool also has the ability to generate medical examination records for patients written in plain English for fourth graders. Studies show that patients tend to forget up to 80% of what their doctors and nurses have told them. Abridge's AI tool automatically generates a record that summarizes how to take medicine, how to exercise, and the schedule for re-examination for patients, so the burden on the doctor's side is greatly reduced.

Michelle Thompson, M.D., a primary care physician who uses Abridge's AI tools, says, 'The AI tools have freed up nearly two hours of my day. I am now able to be 100% present for my patients and they are more active participants in their care.'

However, generative AI that generates sentences sometimes causes a phenomenon called `` hallucination '' that forges and outputs a complete lie. This hallucination is one of the interesting elements in generating sentences for play, but it can lead to mistakes that should not be allowed in the high-risk area of medicine. For this reason, most of the AI tools used in medical care leave the role of human doctors to derive medical examination results from data, and AI is only responsible for compiling records prepared by human doctors.

John Halamka, president of Mayo Clinic Platform, a company aiming to introduce AI to the medical system, said, 'At this stage, we need to carefully choose the use cases for AI. Mitigating it by itself would be a big win,' he commented.