AI: Making clinicians jobs a little easier

With the shift to a value-based reimbursement model, hospitals and clinicians are looking for ways to increase efficiencies and improve patient outcomes. Artificial intelligence can help to streamline diagnoses and treatments by culling through volumes of data and pinpointing specific disease types or other patient data. Patients who need to be seen are seen quicker because a doctor or nurse wasn't spending time looking through reams of reports, which in turn increases satisfaction all around. The goal of cognitive computing is to make knowledge workers more effective, not to replace them, says Hal Andrews, president of healthcare at software company Digital Reasoning. "Any workflow that requires humans to read or skim or scan vast amounts of data, technology can make that more efficient," Andrews tells Healthcare Dive.