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In the healthcare sector, digital workflows can be incredibly complex. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems accumulate huge amounts of data — much of which is private, sensitive and personally identifiable — creating an ever-expanding workload for physicians and care teams. |
That’s why for pharmacists, physicians, patients and all healthcare employees, there’s an important case to be made for integrating intelligent automation. Implemented effectively, innovative technology and operational efficiency create a virtuous cycle — once you start improving your capabilities, you gain the sophistication to continuously improve.
Here’s a closer look at what the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are making possible, including how they can help alleviate physician and pharmacist burnout.
So many medical professionals feel rushed to complete their tasks before the day is done, due to the heavy administrative burden that they and their teams carry. EMRs are a major contributor to this — and while they have added huge value to the medical field and help deliver customized care to patients, the amount of extra work they have caused is leading to burnout.
Today, a third of physicians say that they spend excessive amounts of time on record keeping. No doubt pharmacy teams share similar sentiments — especially those that operate out of high-volume clinics where documentation, prescriptions and insurance follow-up keep piling on.
In healthcare, AI applications have the chance to do what they do best, based on decades of research that have been done in the fields of machine learning. Deep learning allows this technology to identify patterns and anomalies in huge volumes of disparate data, and natural language processing allows it to translate those findings into intelligible insights — improving the performance of critical, timesaving functions such as speech-to-text transcription.
That’s why there are already real-world use cases where AI is making a substantial difference in supporting care teams and their patients; one Toronto-based pilot project reports that its AI assistant has helped reduce unexpected fatalities by 26 per cent.
AI is especially impactful when integrated into EMR systems, expediting the administrative processes that keep pharmacists and physicians from their most meaningful and enjoyable work. This technology reduces how long it takes to receive and retrieve information. It can automate the creation and matching of documents, and tools such as AI scribes have been shown to triple the speed of charting.
This is why digital health solutions such as the Collaborative Health Record (CHR) from TELUS Health have proven to be so transformative for care professionals.
The CHR is a unified yet configurable solution that can be customized not only for different types of provider, but for patients too.
AI-powered pharmacy automation, analytics and workflows can be managed and queried intuitively, reducing the hours pharmacists and their teams spend parsing paperwork. And TELUS Fuel iX’s purpose-built tools enhance capabilities across healthcare workflows, offering features like AI-driven inbox management, intelligent document processing and automated clinic letter generation.
By securely applying sector-specific generative AI (Gen AI), these tools enable clinicians to spend half the time they normally would creating patient charts and matching inbox files.
On the patient side, the CHR Assistant Chat Bot is able to operate around the clock and has been successful in resolving 70 per cent of routine inquiries — an immense relief for patients who would otherwise be spending their valuable time on hold, waiting for a representative.
Having AI doesn’t replace workers. It allows them to reclaim their time — and just as crucially, their downtime — while also letting them focus on the most engaging aspects of their jobs. It also enables whole-team collaboration, reducing friction across roles.
The timing couldn’t be better. Current talent shortages in the sector are exacerbated by burnout. Employees are feeling overworked and under resourced, and administrative burden only adds to this.
But more than anything, AI allows pharmacists and other medical professionals to put the “care” back in “healthcare”; not just delivering treatments as fast as possible, but actually ensuring patients feel seen, heard and supported.
For too long, labor-intensive, low-value, manual workflows have limited the potential pharmacy and care teams. Now there are tangible ways for AI to remedy this, thanks to solutions like the CHR from TELUS Health.
As noted by Jeremy Hessing-Lewis, Principal of Compliance at TELUS Health, “AI holds the opportunity to fundamentally change how we interact with technology in healthcare, because these tools remove administrative distractions and allow providers to connect with patients as human beings.”
For more detailed insight into how AI-powered automation is transforming EMR systems, download the discussion paper from TELUS Health.