Software company DrFirst has developed an AI-powered tool to streamline medication refill and renewal requests, meant to boost patient safety by flagging transcription mistakes.
The tool could be helpful in reducing clinician burnout, which is often seen in senior living staff and healthcare workers in general. By easing administrative tasks like medication renewal requests, this tool could help fix these challenges, the company says.
“Anything we can do as an industry to remove the friction and the burden clinicians are facing is a small win, and a lot of small wins together is a big win,” Colin Banas, DrFirst’s chief medical officer, told HealthcareIT News.
As Banas explained, when medication renewal requests come in, the data takes time to be re-typed by healthcare staff, and can also sometimes be input incorrectly. DrFirst’s AI-driven technology helps address this by populating fields in the request automatically. The technology also prevents transcription errors by flagging incorrect medication dose numbers, for example, that may have been accidentally typed in by humans. By automating the process, senior living residents and other patients can receive the correct medication doses, and staff burnout can be reduced.
“A lot of people want to hit home runs with AI, like, AI is going to cure cancer with [IBM’s AI robot] Watson,” Banas told HealthcareIT News. “I would rather AI do these repetitive, mundane tasks with such reliability that we can start knocking things off the plate of clinicians.” Recently, senior living and operators and healthcare providers have looked to AI to address continued staffing challenges. Health systems spent 27% more from March 2022 to March 2023 on talent acquisition efforts compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to a report by consulting company Kaufman Hall. ChatGPT and other large language models help with charting, taking notes and filling out forms. A recent study estimated that 40% of healthcare working hours could be augmented by using AI.
