Chances are you’ve encountered augmented intelligence (AI)—commonly called artificial intelligence— in your practice.
If you have not, it is likely you will soon see the technology find its way into your daily routine given that nearly two-third of physicians reported that they used AI tools in 2024. That was nearly double the share of doctors that reported using it the prior year, an AMA survey (PDF) showed.
Health care AI can help with everything from clinical decision making to administrative activities. These are among the reasons that AMA defines AI as augmented intelligence—emphasizing that AI’s role is to help health care professionals, not replace them.
As part of the AMA Insight Network, Suja Mathew, MD, executive vice president and chief clinical officer for Atlantic Health, had a conversation with Margaret Lozovatsky, MD, the AMA’s chief medical information officer and vice president of digital health innovations, and a practicing pediatric hospitalist.
Atlantic Health is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine. Among other benefits, participants in the AMA Health System Member Program have access to the AMA Insight Network’s Quality, Safety and Equity community. This virtual forum provides an opportunity for like-minded leaders from across the country to hear more examples of how leading health systems are finding innovative ways to address health care inequities in their communities.
Here are some highlights of the many topics covered in these two physician experts’ wide-ranging conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Dr. Mathew: Do you see that the adoption of AI is spread equally across the industry?
Dr. Lozovatsky: We were very intentional to survey clinicians across the country, across specialties and also in different care settings, from private practice—one- to two-doctor practices—to large integrated health systems. We did not see a huge difference between those in private practice versus those practicing in health systems, which was somewhat surprising.
Dr. Mathew: Who is driving this? Everything is not coming from the big players. Where are we seeing the innovation come from?
Dr. Lozovatsky: We have often seen innovation come from the bigger players and that landscape is changing somewhat, particularly because I think the bigger players are recognizing that this technology is moving so quickly that they can’t do it all. The bigger EHR vendors are still driving a lot of this. But we are seeing some of these smaller companies really recognize that they need to integrate into the overarching workflow, so there are a lot more partnerships in the industry.
Dr. Mathew: We need to talk about the rapidity of adoption. It is so unlike us in medicine because we do not like to change. I’d love to hear your insight on why this is happening around this technology.
Dr. Lozovatsky: We are in a place in health care today where physicians are feeling the burdens and the burnout challenges and they’re hungry for solutions. These tools are offering solutions in a way that others have not before. These technologies are improving our day-to-day ability to care for patients and they have the potential to improve outcomes. Physicians are recognizing that and there’s much more excitement than we’ve ever seen about new technology.
Dr. Mathew: I want to talk about staffing and the fear of AI replacing the human. Do you see that happening?
Dr. Lozovatsky: One of my colleagues says it best: “We don't believe that AI will replace physicians, but we do believe that physicians that understand how to use AI will replace those that don't.” And I think that's going to be important in that I don't fear that our workforce will be replaced. I fear that we will not upskill our clinicians quickly to the point where they will not be able to adequately use these tools to the best of their ability and we won't have all the potential gains. I think of this technology as opening up the ability to give us the time back to do the things that bring us joy.
In my clinical life, for example, I see newborns in the hospital and I absolutely love the time I spend with the moms. That's what brings me joy. These tools that take away some of the administrative burden will decrease the pressures on staffing and will allow us to have more time in our day to do the things that make us happy.
Dr. Mathew: I'm going to ask you to look in that crystal ball over five years. Where do you see this going for us by 2030?
Dr. Lozovatsky: What I see in the next five years, I hope, is an industry really thinking about the potential of this technology. We now have digitized our clinical records. What we haven’t done is, we haven’t streamlined our ability to take that data—and there’s so much data in there—and truly translate it into actionable information for the clinician.
I want to see us move to a place where we liberate that data and we present it to the clinicians in real time. That’s not something we have ever been able to do with previous technology suites because we focused so much on structured data.
But now AI has allowed us to take those disparate pieces of data and translate it into a story and hopefully start to truly trend what is happening to our patients and present that information to the clinician so we can focus on making those best clinical decisions and not sifting through vast amounts of information.
Catch up on AI with the AMA
From AI implementation to digital health adoption and EHR usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors.
That includes work on the AMA STEPS Forward® toolkit, “Governance for Augmented Intelligence,” which was developed in collaboration with Manatt Health and is a comprehensive eight-step guide for health care systems to establish a governance framework to implement, manage and scale AI solutions.
Find out how participants in the AMA Health System Member Program are using AI to make meaningful change.
Also, learn more with the AMA about the emerging landscape of health care AI. And find out how to apply AI to transform health care with the “AMA ChangeMedEd® Artificial Intelligence in Health Care Series.”
