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Abstract
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The artificial intelligence (AI) era in medicine is well underway, and it's hard to imagine a more suitable showcase for the potential of AI than clinical care. With its layers of complexity, embodied in the classic steps of presentation, diagnosis, and treatment, medical practice should only benefit from what I currently see as AI's most important contribution to our field--more and better information. Among other things, AI has already shown promise in medical image interpretation, a boon for multiple specialties, including oncology, gastroenterology, and cardiology.1 The deployment of large language models to help manage and integrate administrative data and information in its myriad forms should improve efficiency and patient care.2
It is clear that AI, a new set of highly sophisticated, ever-evolving tools, is going to change many things about the way medicine is done.3 What is not going to change, however, is the very human experience of ill and injured people seeking help from strangers, which is what we are to most of those who come through our doors. Patients in pain do not really care about the cool new systems and methods we use to figure out what is wrong with them and how to fix it. They just want to feel better. They're grateful for our help, of course. But, for many, the hospital is an inherently stressful place where everybody but the patient seems to be in control. Busy and crowded, with unavoidable delays, it is exactly the wrong setting for patients seeking compassionate family-centered medical and surgical care and for staff who are frustrated and stressed by their work environment.
One troubling aspect of this inescapable truth is examined in this issue of Pediatrics by Waltzman et al,4 who developed an AI tool to identify unreported incidents of verbal and physical violence against nurses. Such outbursts are all too common, as any health care provider can confirm. They are also routinely regarded as an unfortunate fact of life on the clinical frontlines and notoriously underreported.
To address this problem, the researchers used natural language processing, a type of AI that scans text to assess meaning, to help review of more than 19 000 nursing notes involving 2827 inpatients at an urban community hospital. The notes covered the 6-month period from July through December 2022. Of the 26 violent episodes identified that would be considered as workplace violence according to the hospital's criteria, just 7 had been reported. ...
Language: en |