The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is piloting several artificial intelligence tools to help reduce the administrative burden and burnout among its employees and physicians, all while providing a better experience for the veteran.
At ACT-IAC’s Federal Insights Exchange event in Washington, D.C., today, one VA official shared how the VA’s ambient scribe pilot is utilizing AI during clinical encounters.
Dr. Kaeli Yuen is the VA’s AI product lead within the VA Office of Information and Technology’s (OIT) Office of the Chief Technology Officer, but she is also a physician herself who left the clinical track to impact healthcare from beyond the bedside.
“It’s solving the problem of physicians having this overwhelming documentation burden, where every time they have an interaction with the patient, they have to document it in the electronic health record,” Dr. Yuen said of the pilot.
“These ambient scribe tools, they ambiently listen to the clinical encounter and then summarize the encounter into the format that physicians use for their electronic health record notes or writes the note for them,” she added.
At this point in time, Dr. Yuen said that the physician is required to review the summary, make any necessary edits, and sign off on it themselves before submitting it to the patient’s electronic health record.
“It’s pretty incredible,” added Dr. Susan Kirsh, a physician and the VA’s deputy undersecretary for health for discovery, education, and affiliated networks (DEAN). “I think I can speak for local communities, we want to spend all of our time taking care of the patients. And the documentation over the years has gotten to be pretty high. So, this is something that is transformative.”
Dr. Yuen noted that many veterans are still “very skeptical” of this pilot and having their doctor’s visit recorded, so the VA is working to “find the balance between maintaining a level of privacy and security that veterans expect, and providing them with the ease of experience.”
Another pilot underway at the VA to reduce the administrative burden for employees is one related to generative AI, according to Dr. Yuen.
“One of the things that our office is experimenting with is generative AI interfaces for VA employee administrative burden,” she explained. “So, there’s a lot of excitement about these tools – folks from all over VA are coming to our office asking if they can pilot a generative AI use case to do things like write emails, summarize policy documents, draft contracting packages, summarize veteran user experience survey data, lots of things. People from all over VA want this,” Dr. Yuen said.
As OIT helps VA employees to stand up these pilots, she said her office is focused on the success metrics so that it knows whether or not a pilot is successful. However, Dr. Yuen said this is easier said than done.
“This is one area [where] we’re struggling a little bit,” she said. “We’re trying to define what the success measures are, and we’re not sure what the right things to go after are. We tend to always land on ‘time saved.’ So, it used to take us 10 hours to analyze a survey, now it takes us two hours to analyze the survey. But I kind of feel like there’s something more we’re leaving on the table here. And the way that we’re applying the tools might be part of the problem.”
“I think what we’re doing is applying the tools to a process that is built without those tools in mind and maybe there’s a different way we should be doing things,” Dr. Yuen added.
