It’s not surprising that the diagnostic impacts of AI in healthcare tend to get the lion’s share of attention, but in the year ahead AI is likely to bring a number of dramatic changes to the administrative side of the healthcare, too.
In a recent interview at HealthcareIT News, John Harrison, senior vice president at Concord Technologies, a cloud fax and document process automation company, pointed to the significant potential for AI-enabled technologies to reduce administrator and clinician burnout and improving overall staff satisfaction.
“Advances in unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing are now enabling intelligent data capture software to automatically learn how to identify, classify and extract patient-related information from documentation and then index those documents so they can be incorporated into patient records in both clinical and administrative applications,” he explained.
The most immediate impact of that development, Harrison said, will be a reduction in the need for administrators to handle data directly, thus lowering the risk of data entry errors or omissions.
On another front, cybersecurity, Harrison expects significant steps forward, too.
“Organizations will streamline and fortify their cybersecurity programs with technologies that already offer a high level of protection so that they can focus on refreshing internal security policies and procedures,” he said. “Priority will be given to technologies that enable secure communication by encrypting data, making sure firewalls are properly configured, updating operating systems, implementing the right anti-virus solutions, and monitoring incoming documents.”
Interestingly, Harrison noted the role AI can play in helping address the long-standing data interoperability.
“For example, providers will turn to new capabilities in cloud-based fax services to digitally automate and facilitate currently manual inbound fax workflows for routing and filing patient documents into the EHR,” he said. “Artificial intelligence technologies like machine learning and natural language processing in cloud fax will increasingly support the development of more complete and accurate electronic health records.”
Specifically, he explained, AI will be able to help classify incoming fax documents by identifying key clinical and patient demographic concepts contained within the documents, while NLP will be used to interpret free unstructured text and then extract relevant information into normalized, discrete data that can then be processed by EHRs.