Dr. Kaeli Yuen, veterans affairs artificial intelligence product manager for the Virginia Office of Information and Technology, Office of the Chief Technology Officer, provided an update on the agency’s assessment of various artificial intelligence pilot projects during the Federal Insights Advisory Board of the American Council on Technology and Industry Exchange Meeting in Washington this week.
WHY IT IS IMPORTANT
Yuen said that while many veterans are skeptical about recording medical visits, doctors are enthusiastic, study finds report z , public-private partnership.
“It’s downright unbelievable,” added Dr. Susan Kirsh, Washington’s deputy undersecretary of health for discovery, education and related networks, in the article.
Yuen said the VA is working to balance “the privacy and security veterans expect with the ease of their experience.”
The forum brings together government workers to improve government performance. On May 29, ACT-IAC hosted Yuen and Kirsch at an FIE event dedicated to VA’s journey to improve care for veterans through the use of artificial intelligence.
In 2021, more than 20 VA offices developed the agency’s artificial intelligence strategy, becoming one of the first federal agencies with an artificial intelligence action plan that led to pilot testing of artificial intelligence for operate in clinical encounters and to administer benefits.
Yuen said many Virginia offices are requesting genAI tools to compile correspondence and documents and summarize information such as veteran user experience survey data.
“People all over the state of Virginia want this,” she said.
However, experimenting with generative AI interfaces to aid address the VA’s overall administrative burden is challenging because of how success is measured with existing workflows, Yuen said.
“I think what we’re doing is applying tools to a process that’s built without those tools, and maybe we should be doing it differently,” she said.
A BIGGER TREND
According to Whende Carroll, clinical informatics advisor at HIMSS, the company’s parent company, at the HIMSS 2023 Global Health Conference and Exhibition, the burden of clinical documentation is top of mind for clinicians.
The fatigue this causes for doctors, nurses and other health care workers can exacerbate adverse events, escalate errors and result in “complications” that cause needy patient outcomes, she added.
While Carroll said artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing, can reduce waste and aid with the productivity of medical records that cause physician fatigue, genAI has been found to result in long and overly complicated reports and an increased risk of errors in government reporting.
Srini Iyer, CTO at Leidos Health & Civil Sector, said ahead of a HIMSS24 presentation on designing genAI to maximize benefits for healthcare organizations that while testing Google’s Med-PaLM 2, a chatbot piloted by Mayo Clinic and others recognized by federal lawmakers challenged – his team faced challenges.
They focused on the three most essential operate case testing needs of healthcare executives, Iyer said.
He noted that by using Leidos vector storage, researchers achieved better results when testing Med-PaLM 2 for accuracy. Using specialized memory was ideal because it allowed the huge language model to look for relationships between unstructured data points, which helped it remember those relationships over time, he explained.
The volume of information and complexity can escalate the risk of errors, such as in mandatory regulatory reporting, “potentially impacting patient care and reimbursement,” Iyer said.
ON RECORDING
“I think I can speak for local communities, we want to spend all our time caring for patients,” Kirsch said in the article.
“And the documentation has become quite extensive over the years. So this is something that is transformative.”