Teams across UW Medicine are piloting tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to determine how the technology can reduce clinician burnout, improve efficiency for staff, provide a secure environment for employees to leverage AI chat and even give care teams more face time with patients.
In the year since UW Medicine issued interim guidance on the use of AI-enabled tools, the UW Medicine AI Taskforce has approved pilots of various solutions, with three new ones launching this month.
Abridge Ambient AI Scribes
On Feb. 4, UW Medicine launched a pilot program using Abridge, a leading ambient AI scribe technology. This five-month pilot involves 75 UW Medicine clinicians, including several at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. Abridge technology translates the conversation in the exam room to a clinical note within the electronic medical record, allowing clinicians to focus on patients instead of taking notes. UW Medicine’s pilot is designed to assess whether we observe the benefits of the tool that we expect to see, including decreased burnout and greater well-being for our providers. This pilot will help assess the benefits and optimize how UW Medicine could use the technology more broadly if approved post-pilot. One of the pilot leads, Associate Chief Clinical Information Officer Angad Singh, MD, says participants have already praised the technology. Given the initial feedback, the pilot team is optimistic about the initiative and its potential value to UW Medicine.
“By capturing medical notes seamlessly, this technology brings the human touch back to healthcare,” Singh says.
UW Medicine Chat App
A UW Medicine Chat App pilot also launched last week to support AI-enabled queries and conversations like ChatGPT does, but in a secure, approved environment that protects patient information and other UW Medicine data. Publicly available tools such as ChatGPT are proving useful to many organizations but also introduce risk and have limited value to healthcare organizations since they are not HIPAA-compliant. The UW Medicine Chat App enables users across the enterprise to explore how they can utilize the technology in their everyday work and participants in the pilot represent a variety of areas across UW Medicine including but not limited to, clinicians, researchers, administrators and trainees.
“We’re excited that our pilot participants will have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with AI in their day-to-day work, and we hope that this project will help us understand how to expand access to the entire UW Medicine community,” says Noah Hoffman, MD, PhD, project lead on the UW Medicine Chat App pilot. “I think the best way for us to drive innovation in this area is for as many of us as possible to have the tools to explore, experiment and become well-informed.”
Learn more about appropriate use cases for the UW Medicine Chat App.
Evidently AI-Enabled Chart Surfacing
At the end of February, UW Medicine will roll out a large-scale pilot of Evidently, an AI-powered software application that integrates structured and unstructured data from Epic, Care Everywhere, and by mid-spring, clinical data from other sources. This tool, being piloted by 50 outpatient providers and all inpatient and emergency room teams, is intended to streamline chart review, presenting a comprehensive, organized view of a patient’s clinical history. The system will also assist our clinical documentation improvement team with accurately capturing patient complexity and helping our quality teams ensure proper reporting of patient safety events. If the three-month pilot proves successful, Evidently could be extended across the entire UW Medicine system.
As a reminder, please exercise caution when using ChatGPT, DeepSeek and other publicly available generative AI tools. Make sure your intended use of them complies with UW Medicine’s interim guidance. Learn more about generative AI at UW Medicine. For questions about AI tools at UW Medicine email GenAIatUWM@uw.edu.
