E D I T O R ' S Q U E S T I O N

The recent explosive growth of foundation and large language models , such as GPT-4 , points to a future in which clinicians and patients are empowered with personalised medicine , clinical decision support , increased patient access , and workforce optimisation . But while the overarching promise for the future of generative AI in healthcare is clear , there are also ways in which this technology is already shaping healthcare delivery today .

For example , the healthcare industry is laden with administrative processes ; many of which are manual , paper-based , time-consuming and error-prone . Inefficient healthcare workflows can occur in outpatient management , billing , appointment management , approvals , consultations , or any other part of the healthcare journey . In every instance , they have a negative impact on clinicians , patients and healthcare organisations .

Modern technologies , such as AIpowered speech recognition , can be used to help relieve some of these pressures , enabling clinicians to work more efficiently and intelligently . These technologies are designed to recognise and record passages of speech , converting them into detailed clinical notes , regardless of how quickly they ’ re delivered . By reducing repetition and supporting standardisation across departments , they can enhance the accuracy as well as the quality of patient records .

Guy ’ s and St Thomas ’ NHS Trust is a prime example of an organisation that has benefited from this technology . The Trust ’ s 180 dental clinicians and support staff adopted AI-powered speech recognition to create accurate and detailed letters to relay information to their patients . Historically , these were written by manually typing from dictations made by clinicians , a time-consuming and inefficient process . Since deploying , the average turnaround time for clinical letters has gone from four weeks to just five days . It ’ s proved so successful that now over 90 % of all staff across the Trust ’ s dental department are using this technology , in order to improve the quality of patient care and reduce some of the pressure on employees .

As AI ’ s use in healthcare continues to evolve , there ’ s no doubt that investment in the technology is only going to increase . In fact , NHS England is already investing in various pilots which use the technology , with £ 123million earmarked for AI projects over the next four years under the AI in Health and Care Award . This investment could be the key to relieving some of the administrative burden faced by our clinicians and helping to reduce burnout levels throughout the sector . �

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