Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a subject of conversation and agent of change across industries. From boardrooms to classrooms, its strengths, weaknesses and appropriate use cases are top of mind — and nowhere is that more true than in the healthcare sector.
What are the most reliable and responsible applications of this potentially revolutionary tool? While the technology comes with challenges that medical organizations need to take seriously — such as data privacy in healthcare AI — one of the most immediate and important is in electronic medical record (EMR) systems.
EMRs are crucial for modern healthcare practices, but accompanying these advanced tools is an increased level of administrative burden on physicians and their teams — so much so that burnout has become a major issue at a time when the industry is already short-staffed.
Deploying AI in healthcare systems such as the EMR presents a powerful solution, as demonstrated by West Carleton Family Health Team (WCFHT) with the Collaborative Health Record (CHR) from TELUS Health.
WCFHT is a primary care clinic in Ottawa, Ontario, that supports approximately 21,000 patients. “Our total team size is about 70, so we're a big clinic — which also means we have a tonne of documents that come into our system,” explains Chris LeBouthillier, Executive Director, WCFHT.
A long-time CHR customer, the team was interested in how tasks could be streamlined to ease the administrative burden. It often took more than 20 minutes to capture full medical histories for new patients, and providers were spending too much time on inbox management, billing codes and documentation instead of patient care.
That all started to shift with the rollout of sophisticated AI tools embedded in the CHR.
Many AI-optimized tools that are streamlining workflows for clinics across Canada are now included directly in the CHR, such as AI scribes. “Within the first two weeks of using a scribe in our clinic, doctors who were working our weekend clinic were emailing me and saying, ‘I actually got out on time today,’” recalls LeBouthillier.
“We’ve said the goal is for providers to be happier, but patients generally have been happier too because of the experience of the clinician focusing directly on them and not being so busy typing.”
AI now assists with a range of other administrative functions, such as correctly identifying the correct patient for the corresponding documentation, and automatically categorizing documents. Note autopopulation also helps make the charting process more efficient.
There are also new inbox triage capabilities in the CHR so that non-urgent messages can be deprioritized, delegated or delayed with one or two clicks — a function that’s currently being designed and refined by the TELUS Health team with direct input from customers.
“We think of it as a system for keeping the right person doing the right work at any given time,” says LeBouthillier. “So AI might not always do the work for us, but it can at least help make sure that the right person can do the work that they’re supposed to do.”
Implementing AI into healthcare workflows doesn’t happen instantly, and AI itself isn’t perfect. WCFHT had to invest time into building the skills and trust necessary to make the most of these tools.
Effective, efficient and intuitive design matters, as does having proper fallback options. These factors were all top of mind for TELUS Health in developing AI purposefully for healthcare use cases and workflows.
As Ratcho Batchvarov, Vice President Provider Solutions at TELUS Health, explains, “We want to build trust and ensure transparency before diving into decision-making tools, because physicians are appropriately cautious about AI. Transparency in showing how AI works and allowing them to review outputs is critical.”
TELUS Health’s CHR AI-powered features are built to make life easier for those working across Canada’s healthcare sector, and deliver real value where it’s needed most.
One of the foremost ways AI can address challenges in healthcare is its ability to empower people to accomplish more without feeling like they’re doing more — automating the parts of their job that exhaust them so they can focus on what energizes them.
That’s why the team is excited for AI’s future potential in summarization, so that physicians on duty can easily review on-call documents — and physicians who are off-duty don’t have to fret about whether their colleagues have the content and context they need.
“I think it has huge potential for providers in general to sort out at a quick glance what they need to read now versus what they can read later, because the onslaught of documents is substantial,” says LeBouthillier.
WCFHT isn’t just capitalizing on the AI-powered future; they’re shaping it through their innovative applications of the CHR and their collaboration with TELUS Health.
In the process, they’re helping everyone on their team — from the physicians and pharmacists, to PAs and support staff — cast off their administrative burden, prevent burnout and enjoy their work.
What could your team do with AI solutions like these? Explore the possibilities further by downloading the full TELUS Health AI Technologies Report.