Hospitals navigate challenges such as capacity management, patient flow optimization and staffing shortages. And with 63% of nurses reporting they are assigned too many patients, it's imperative to envision and create the hospital of the future: a dynamic, patient-centric healthcare ecosystem powered by innovation and efficiency.
In the hospital of the future, the bottlenecks hospitals face today (staffing constraints, high costs, sicker patients, not enough capacity) won’t exist. Nurses can have lunch breaks, patients can receive treatments on time, surgeons can easily schedule the OR, staff are freed from manual data entry and no one waits for a bed in the ED.
The future of healthcare operations is not out of reach. The technology is available to satisfy patients and providers, but it takes rethinking the way hospitals operate and a top-down, bottom-up adoption mentality.
At the core of the hospital of the future is AI-powered workflow automation and data-driven decision-making. Hospitals today rely too heavily on decision-making without access to all the information needed to inform their choices. For nurses and doctors, actionable data is their ally. That means adopting progressively advanced analytics to equip staff with the decision-making tools they need. It’s going from descriptive and diagnostic levels that simply display capacity limits or patient bottlenecks to predictive and prescriptive levels that use AI and machine learning to predict likely patient volumes or appointment needs and suggest the best ways to meet them.
And now, generative AI has emerged to help make the full transformation into a hospital of the future a reality. Generative AI is a real, working technology with tangible benefits that are directly applicable to healthcare operations. When properly leveraged, it can draw on the wealth of existing healthcare data and give leaders, providers and staff the insights and predictions they need to supplement their skills and expertise. Through large language models, generative AI solutions can conduct human-like conversations with their users, giving immediate data-backed advice responses in helpful terms.
In the hospital of the future, three key abilities of generative AI can help healthcare staff enhance their decision-making and foster continuous improvement across the enterprise.
1. Answer healthcare staff’s questions in real time.
By using their voices, desktops, smartphones or tablets, nurses can get up-to-the-minute staffing or unit recommendations, leaders in the operating room or infusion center can seek answers for optimizing schedules, and hospital administrators can ask for insights regarding volume shifts or utilization trends. These conversations offer healthcare staff easy, invaluable insights and recommendations to smooth patient flow and optimize capacity, day to day and in the long term. Importantly, this provides access to essential information at great speed without having to navigate an app or fight with report filters.
2. Warn staff of future roadblocks and suggest solutions.
Generative AI, working in tandem with robust AI/machine learning predictions and optimizations, can proactively alert staff to potential issues throughout the day, even when they are not actively engaged with their technology tools. It can flag capacity issues like potential discharge barriers or unit overflows through email, SMS and other messaging platforms, which provide tangible recommendations on how to address and resolve them so staff can take prompt action and stay ahead of obstacles. In this way, generative AI helps staff promote efficiency, minimize disruptions and learn how to foresee other capacity issues.
3. Offer “in the moment” problem-solving and mitigation.
By continually monitoring processes and data, staff can proactively address potential safety or operational issues before they escalate. Generative AI can smartly summarize problems such as understaffing and congestion and offer recommended actions with impact analysis that are consistent with the hospital’s capacity protocols. If the solution detects a possible risk in any area of the hospital, it can offer mitigations to flex other assets and resources that are mindful of the health system’s capacity protocols, which enables staff to act accordingly and ensure the highest level of patient safety and quality of care.
In the hospital of the future, generative AI would enable data-driven decision-making, enhance operational efficiency and foster an ongoing culture of curiosity and improvement, freeing clinicians from operational constraints and allowing them to focus on their calling to help people.
A trusted partner who understands the applications of analytics, the cutting edge of AI and the best use cases to generate immediate ROI can help make this hospital of the future a reality. Learn more about generative AI and how it can help your health system by scheduling an executive briefing.
Tim Vasil is senior vice president, engineering, LeanTaaS.
A Premier Corporate Partner of ACHE, LeanTaaS is the market leader in providing AI-powered and cloud-based capacity management, staffing, and patient flow software and transformation services for health systems. For more information, visit ache.org/LeanTaaS.