ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — The Mercy hospital system and technology leader Microsoft have plans to roll out new artificial intelligence programming across their facilities.
Hospital leaders are on a mission to take a load off healthcare workers and enhance the patient experience with the use of human-thinking technology.
On Wednesday, a group of the hospital system’s top execs from across seven states met for an event at the Ballpark Hilton in Downtown St. Louis, with the future of AI being a big topic of discussion.
Joe Kelly, Mercy’s executive vice president for the Office of Transformation shared that Microsoft Corporation chose the hospital to roll out the new technology because of its existing architecture in the health care realm, including its cloud capabilities and its ability to secure patient privacy.
“Our responsibility is to do no harm to patients but we also have an obligation to improve operational efficiencies, to provide the best care at the lowest cost and to reduce clinical burden.”
Kelly added that the systems would not replace operational leaders.
The collaboration comes at a time when health care staff are stretched thin and leaders look to a solution to free up time for staff to focus on patient care.
With the new system, patients would be able to ask questions via Chatbot and get help understanding their lab results. The bot would also take patient calls to schedule appointments and recommend follow-ups. For staff, it would help them quickly find important information about Mercy policies and procedures, and locate HR-related answers.
“Clearly we are already using AI on a smaller scale. I think this merge could be interesting for a few aspects including establishing competition between other big vendors," said Saint Louis University computer scientist Dr. Flavio Esposito
The professor led an AI research effort across multiple concentrations on campus and stressed that he is in support of the evolution of technology in industries as long as it is done with in-depth research.
“Any corporation should invest in educating on how to not misuse this for the greater good," Esposito said.
“There are going to be some patients who are very concerned and rightfully so and it's one of the reasons we have the right guardrails and protections around that before we deploy anything,” Kelly added.
The hope is for these models to be launched across Mercy before the middle of 2024.