Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Can AI Reduce Medical Errors?

Transcript

Can AI Reduce Medical Errors? · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:07
  John: Well, let's, well, I think everybody wants to see you, Bob, but that's Oh, okay.
• 0:11
  John: But that's the, the, the, the, the, uh, that's the nature of ev of, of, of patients.
• 0:15
  John: I think they want that human connection, but you really lay out some really terrifying, but.
• 0:21
  John: Honest statistics, 800,000 to million people harmed or killed by medical errors every year.
• 0:28
  John: Um, the, uh, the, the, that, that terrifying study, another one met, uh, a, a a, a very large scale study of autopsies that, you know, 20 per based on a scientific review of autopsies, 20% of diagnoses, some of which could have been life altering.
• 0:46
  John: Are missed, um, in, uh, in our current system.
• 0:50
  John: So there's clearly a big opportunity, um, to improve, um, clinical outcomes.
• 0:57
  John: And you, you kind of anchor, uh, the, the, the practice of medicine.
• 1:02
  John: Um.
• 1:03
  John: Back to the, the turn of the, of the 20th century when, when it, and, and sort of said that education hasn't moved forward and you kind of gently suggest that we aren't making as much progress on mand errors and improving clinical practice as we could.
• 1:19
  John: Okay, so if we wanna save more lives and improve patients' lives, what do we need to do in terms of leveraging technology to improve outcomes for patients?
• 1:30
  Robert Wachter: Well, I, I could tell you that when I'm on the wards now, I am quite frequently using AI to help me be smarter.
• 1:41
  Robert Wachter: And I don't know that I was missing that many diagnoses before I did this, but I think I'm smarter now than I, than I was.
• 1:49
  Robert Wachter: And that's not, that's not because my brain's getting better, any better at my age.
• 1:53
  Robert Wachter: Um.
• 1:54
  Robert Wachter: You know, we have this practice we call a curbside consult, meaning I don't really need a full on cardiology or infectious disease consultant where they're gonna spend an hour with the patient.
• 2:03
  Robert Wachter: But I just have a question that I'd love to have answered, and until a year or two ago, there was no good way for me to answer, get an answer to that question without calling my favorite infectious disease doctor.
• 2:16
  Robert Wachter: You might say, well, how about, um, you know, medical textbooks like up to date?
• 2:20
  Robert Wachter: Those are great when you have a very straightforward, what's the right dose of apixaban for a patient with pulmonary embolism?
• 2:27
  Robert Wachter: It has no idea what I'm talking about.
• 2:29
  Robert Wachter: If I say, this is an 82-year-old man with CLL who comes in with a fever, a white count of creatinine of 3.2 and abnormal LFTs, I can say exactly that sentence into open evidence or GPT or Gemini, and it will give me a cogent answer that is on par with what I would get from my favorite neighborhood specialist.
• 2:47
  Robert Wachter: So I think where you're going to see real.
• 2:51
  Robert Wachter: Uh, improvements in medical practice and diagnosis and in, in treatment choices is the fact that the AI now can, can essentially scale the knowledge of specialists.
• 3:02
  Robert Wachter: So it makes me as a generalist.
• 3:04
  Robert Wachter: Have access to specialty knowledge in my pocket that it makes a nurse practitioner potentially as good as a generalist in some ways, and I don't think we're quite there yet.
• 3:14
  Robert Wachter: It may make patients and their families able to do things that they previously required a, a physician to do.
• 3:19
  Robert Wachter: So now this gets much better.
• 3:22
  Robert Wachter: Right now I have to pull my phone outta the pocket and say to open evidence, this is an 82-year-old man, et cetera, et cetera, in the future.
• 3:30
  Robert Wachter: Of course, that's silly that that function should be completely embedded in the electronic health record.
• 3:34
  Robert Wachter: So that I have to tell, I don't have to tell it anything.
• 3:36
  Robert Wachter: It is, it knows everything about the patient and you then can envision a world where it not only knows that for, but for an outpatient, it's following the data that's coming from their Apple watch or from their oral ring.
• 3:46
  Robert Wachter: It's integrating that.
• 3:48
  Robert Wachter: It means that I can track how a patient's blood pressure or asthma doing without them having to come from an office visit.
• 3:54
  Robert Wachter: All of that points to a world that's much more efficient and, and much more, much less error pro than the one we had today.