Intro: HCA Healthcare, a prominent healthcare provider, and Google Cloud have announced a collaboration aimed at leveraging generative AI technology to streamline tasks like clinical documentation, freeing up physicians and nurses to dedicate more time to patient care. 

Why It’s Notable:

• Nearly 63% of physicians report signs of burnout at least once per week, with factors such as system inefficiencies and administrative burdens being cited as leading causes. The partnership aims to address this problem, by utilising generative AI to streamline administrative tasks like clinical documentation. The collaboration also involves Augmedix, a healthcare technology company specialising in ambient medical documentation which combined with Google Cloud’s generative AI technology, will enable medical notes to be generated from physician-patient conversations and then promptly transferred to the hospital's electronic health record system, streamlining operations significantly.

• In conjunction with this, HCA has identified another area for improvement involving generative AI which is focused on improving patient handoffs between nurses which is typically a very manual and time-consuming process. HCA Healthcare’s team has built a system incorporating Google Cloud’s technology which automatically generates handoff reports and is designed to promote continuity, consistency, patient safety and clinical quality. After initial beta testing, HCA Healthcare gathered feedback from nurses to further refine the system. 

Industry Implications:

• Generative AI has the potential to revolutionise the healthcare ecosystem with numerous applications across the value chain. One area where it can have a significant impact is the automation of administrative tasks, specifically in healthcare settings and over the last number of months we’ve seen a rise in the number of solutions attempting to address this. Amazon Web Services recently released HealthScribe, which generates transcripts and summaries of patient visits, to compete with Microsoft's generative AI EHR tool Nuance. It’s likely we’ll see more health systems incorporating these tools to optimise administrative workflows and improve operational efficiency. 

• Although generative AI has far reaching potential in the field of healthcare, it’s not without its challenges such as potential for bias, privacy risks, ethical ramifications, misinformation and inaccuracy. Therefore current applications of the technology are limited to low-risk administrative use cases such as note taking, creating patient records and optimising workflows. Beyond these tasks, the current landscape is not ready for diagnosis and patient facing tools yet due to the higher risk involved. However, with the speed of the current landscape and developing technology, we can potentially expect to see the application of the technology in these use cases in the future.