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Indianapolis-based hospital system Community Health Network said it is on track to meet its goal this year of saving $10 million in costs and streamlining care through increased use of artificial intelligence, or AI.
Many hospital systems already use AI for back-office tasks including billing procedures, appointment reminders and scheduling. Yet, hospitals are increasingly looking to AI to do more.
Dr. Patrick McGill, a family medicine physician and chief transformation officer at Community, said the hospital system is now using AI to identify gaps in care, such as mining chart data to discover if a patient is overdue for an important preventative screening or to ensure a patient with an abnormal test result receives follow up.
“We’re not trying to replace humans,” he said. “We’re not trying to take the clinician or the clinical decision making out of it. (It’s) how do we enable them to be more efficient and create that high quality?”
Community also uses AI tools for tasks including summarizing patient surveys. Physicians use an AI notetaker to help ease administrative duties from patient visits and chart updates.
McGill said Community set a goal to save $10 million from use of AI in 2025, adding that the system was a little “slow out of the gate,” but is seeing cost savings. These efforts come from an ongoing desire to improve care and the cost of operations, according to Community.
“I think we’ll hit it,” McGill said of the budget goal.
AI use in hospitals on the rise
A study by researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health published in January in the journal Health Affairs found that about 65% of U.S. hospitals reported using AI-assisted predictive models, most used to predict inpatient health trajectories (92%), identify high-risk outpatients (79%) and facilitate scheduling (51%).
The study was based on analyzing responses from 2,425 acute-care hospitals that participated in the 2023 American Hospital Association Annual Survey.
Community Health Network, which has more than 200 sites and affiliated sites across central Indiana, uses AI agents from Notable Health, a Silicon Valley AI company focused on health care, for patient outreach and scheduling.
McGill said Community also uses AI features in in Epic, its main electronic medical record software, and works with another health-care AI provider, Qualified Health, for an AI tool that, like ChatGPT, can assist with creating letters or other response—all HIPAA compliant for medical and data privacy.
“It’s one of those things that we can also use AI to reduce health disparities,” he said. “They might have, food insecurity, social isolation, other transportation needs. AI can help us do that as well… It does tee up the information for them.”
McGill said Community’s use of AI all complies with medical privacy laws. In fact, he said Community blocked access to the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT on its network due to non-compliance with HIPAA medical privacy regulations.
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