Visitors view Nvidia's artificial intelligence technology at the Apsara 2024 conference in Hangzhou, China, on September 19, 2024.
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Nvidia, Google, Microsoft Dozens of other technology companies will be in Las Vegas next week to showcase artificial intelligence tools that they say will save doctors and nurses valuable time.
Sunday marks the official start of the healthcare technology conference called HLTH, which is expected to attract more than 12,000 industry leaders this year. CNBC will be on the ground. And based on the agenda of speakers and announcements leading up to the conference, AI tools to overcome administrative burdens will be the star of the show this year.
Doctors and nurses are responsible for a lot of documentation as they work to keep up with patient records, communicate with insurance companies, and comply with regulators. Often, these tasks are painstakingly manual, in part because health data is isolated and stored across multiple vendors and formats.
The heavy administrative workload is a major cause of burnout in the industry, and is part of the reason why a nationwide shortage of 100,000 health care workers is expected by 2028, according to consulting firm Mercer. Technology companies, eager to carve out a slice of a market whose spending could exceed $6.8 trillion by the end of the decade, see their generative AI tools as being helpful.
Alex Schiffhauer, group product manager at Google, speaks during the Made By Google event at the company's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California, on August 13, 2024.
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Google, for example, said it is expanding its healthcare customer base by addressing the administrative burden with artificial intelligence.
The company on Thursday announced the general availability of its Vertex AI Search for Healthcare software, which it demoed during HLTH last year. Vertex AI Search for Healthcare allows developers to build tools to help doctors quickly search for information across disparate medical records, Google said. New features within Google's Healthcare Data Engine, which help organizations build the platforms they need to support generative AI, are also now available, the company said.
Google on Thursday released the results of a survey that said doctors spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks. In the survey, 80% of providers said this clerical work takes up their time with patients, and 91% said they feel positive about using AI to simplify these tasks.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at a company event on artificial intelligence technologies in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 30, 2024.
Dimas Ardian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Likewise, Microsoft on October 11 announced its suite of tools aimed at reducing the administrative workload for doctors, including medical imaging forms, a healthcare proxy service and an automated documentation solution for nurses, most of which are still in the early stages of development. development.
Microsoft already offers an automated documentation tool for doctors through its subsidiary Nuance Communications, which it acquired in a $16 billion deal in 2021. The tool, called DAX Copilot, uses artificial intelligence to transcribe doctors' visits with patients and turns them into clinical notes and summaries. Ideally, this means that doctors will not have to spend time writing these notes themselves.
Nurses and doctors complete different types of documentation during their shifts, so Microsoft said it's building a separate tool for nurses that better fits their workflow.
AI writing tools like DAX Copilot have been growing in popularity this year, and Nuance competitors like Abridge, which has reportedly raised more than $460 million, and Suki, which has raised $165 million, will also be present at the HLTH conference.
The rate at which the healthcare industry has adopted this new form of clinical documentation seems “historic,” Dr. Shiv Rao, founder and CEO of Abridge, told CNBC in March. Abridge received a coveted investment from Nvidia's venture capital arm that same month.
Nvidia is also preparing to address the workloads of doctors and nurses at HLTH.
Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of healthcare, will deliver a keynote on Monday explaining how using generative AI will help healthcare professionals “dedicate more time to patient care,” according to the conference's website.
Nvidia's graphics processing units, or GPUs, are used to create and deploy the models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar applications. As a result, NVIDIA has been one of the main beneficiaries of the AI boom. Nvidia shares are up more than 150% year to date, and the stock price has tripled in the past year.
The company has made steady progress in the healthcare sector in recent years, offering a range of AI tools across medical devices, drug discovery, genomics and medical imaging. Nvidia has also announced expanded partnerships with companies such as Johnson & Johnson and GE Healthcare In March.
While the healthcare sector has historically been slow to adopt new technology, the buzz around administrative AI tools has been undeniable since ChatGPT burst onto the scene two years ago.
However, many health systems are still in the early stages of evaluating tools and suppliers, and will be making the rounds on the HLTH show floor. Technology companies will have to prove they have the ability to address one of healthcare's most complex problems.
