The UMCG is deploying artificial intelligence (AI for short) to help healthcare providers answer written questions from patients. This is done in cooperation with other hospitals from the EPIC Dutch Association. An AI application in the electronic patient record (EHR) reads the patient's question and provides an answer suggestion. The healthcare provider receives the draft answer created by AI, checks it and makes further adjustments where necessary. It is expected to significantly reduce the administrative burden on physicians, nurse specialists and other healthcare providers.
In recent months, the UMCG and the ETZ in Tilburg ran a trial of this AI application. The UMCG is the first hospital in Europe to actually use the chatbot in written contact with patients. During the trial period, healthcare providers carefully checked the answers prepared by AI. Tom van der Laan, ENT doctor and Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) at the UMCG: "It is wonderful to see what artificial intelligence is capable of. But healthcare remains human work: there is always a doctor or nurse who checks the answer before we send it. Artificial intelligence can support the work and make it easier, but healthcare professionals are irreplaceable in healthcare for now."
Every week, patients submit more than 1,200 written questions to their UMCG healthcare provider. These questions relate, for example, to the use of medication, pain management and whether patients are allowed to resume sports/work/travel after surgery. Answering all those questions costs doctors and other healthcare providers a lot of time. Time they often don't have. "It's very simple," Van der Laan said, "if health care providers have to spend less time on these kinds of administrative tasks, there will be more time for the patient."
The AI application was developed by EHR vendor Epic. During the trial period, the way the system answers patients' questions was refined. It is not a self-learning system; the chatbot does not learn from our patient data. The chatbot is integrated into the EHR, so patient data remains secure within the system. Even the vendor cannot access it.
In America, this application is already being used in several hospitals. "The experiences there are very positive. You might think that such a system makes contact with the health care provider more impersonal, but nothing could be further from the truth. Because caregivers now answer questions between business, they often do so somewhat briefly. Artificial intelligence not only appears to provide more informative and comprehensive answers, but AI does so more empathetically. We expect to have the same positive experiences in the Netherlands."
AI offers many more opportunities for healthcare. "If I have one half-day consultation at the outpatient clinic now, it takes me about 1.5 to 2 hours of preparation time," Van der Laan says. "I read each patient's file, look at changes in medication use and treatments by other healthcare providers, for example. If AI can make a summary of that with only the relevant information, that could save an awful lot of time. But AI can also, for example, create a patient-friendly summary of a surgery report, or quickly write a discharge letter so that the family physician is smoothly informed about the patient's hospitalization. I expect to see many more applications in healthcare in the coming years. First mainly with the so-called language models such as ChatGPT, but eventually also with robotics. The applications are endless."
In the coming weeks and months, more Dutch hospitals with an EPD from the same vendor will start using this application, in cooperation with other hospitals from the EPIC Dutch Association. The cooperation with other hospitals will make it possible to benefit even faster from this technology in unity for the patient and caregivers.
For all applications, there always remains a caregiver, a real human being, involved. And responsible. The system does not give medical advice, but supports the caregiver in her tasks. This benefits the productivity and job satisfaction of the caregiver, but most of all it benefits the quality of care for the patient.
