Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health is pursuing a systemwide strategy to implement augmented intelligence (AI) tools in ways that improve the quality of care, the experience of care and physicians’ well-being.
The strategy is an outgrowth of the health system’s AI Center for Excellence. Over the last several years, an interdisciplinary group of leaders at Jefferson Health have been evaluating the evolving AI landscape and focusing on AI adoption that will improve outcomes for patients and doctors.
“This is not just a technology strategy,” said Jefferson Health President Baligh Yehia, MD, MPP, MSc.
He called it “a bold commitment to reimagine health care—where innovation amplifies compassion, and AI helps us deliver safer, smarter and more accessible care for patients.”
Jefferson 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.
Embracing AI to augment care
One early outgrowth of these efforts is implementation of AI ambient listening technology, which is quickly becoming a health care industry standard to help cut clicks and keystrokes for physicians and help patients and doctors have better, more meaningful and more productive exam-room visits.
At Jefferson Health, the estimate is that the move will help cut administrative burdens for more than 23,000 physicians and other health professionals and help reclaim more than 10 million hours of clinicians’ time by 2028. The initiative was launched shortly after Jefferson Health’s merger with Lehigh Valley Health Network in 2024. Already, there are 1,300 active users generating 30,000 notes weekly, according to Bracken Babula, MD, an associate chief medical information officer at Jefferson Health.
But the AI effort at Jefferson Health goes beyond merely automating documentation tasks. The health system’s leaders say they are embracing AI as way to augment care by:
- Delivering human-center experiences at scale—personalizing every clinical interaction, enhancing face-to-face time and reducing wait times.
- Accelerating insight to action—using AI to predict needs, reduce risks and improve outcomes.
- Building trust through transparency—auditing all AI models for bias, co-designing solutions with key stakeholders and ensuring human oversight in AI deployment.
In his role, Dr. Babula takes part in its AI Center for Excellence (AICoE), which was established in 2022.
The center “did approve and evaluate ambient AI listening,” he noted. “It was actually one of the first big projects we talked about with that group, in addition to some radiology tools that are being used.” Also evaluated were “Epic’s starter kit for AI tools, which includes things like chart summarization and MyChart replies and professional coding.”
The Jefferson Health AI Center of Excellence has two principal charges, Dr. Babula said.
“One is looking at the actual AI. We have AI experts on that committee who are actually looking under the hood, looking at the LLM [large language model] that drives it—all that kind of stuff. And then, simultaneously, we have others in the group who are clinicians or operational folks or business leaders or folks like that like looking at questions like: Do we need this tool? Is this actually solving a problem that we have that we want to be using this tool for?”
The AICoE, Dr. Babula said, “is a combination of both. We talk big picture in that group about Jefferson Health’s overall AI strategy and how can we utilize existing tools we already have, like Microsoft Copilot—which we have an enterprise license for—versus pulling in a new, different vendor for some other AI purpose.”
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 recently launching the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI to give physicians a powerful voice in shaping how AI and other digital tools are harnessed to improve the patient and clinician experience.
For example, the AMA STEPS Forward® “Governance for Augmented Intelligence” toolkit offers a comprehensive eight-step guide for health care systems to establish a governance framework to implement, manage and scale AI solutions.
Keeping physicians in the health AI loop
Dr. Babula noted that the Jefferson Health AICoE draws from many sources of guidance on best practices for evaluation, implementation and use of health AI tools. Among them is the AMA.
“The AMA’s guidelines on this are certainly something that’s factored into it, when we talk about transparency and what is the governance process for AI. How do we make sure we’re reducing biases and avoiding biases in our AI algorithms,” he said. And “obviously, data privacy and security is a huge factor for us and for all health care systems. So, definitely, we are trying to ensure that a lot of those AMA guidelines are incorporated into our approach.”
One key safeguard when implementing health AI tools is Jefferson Health’s “human-in-the-loop” policy. This means physicians and other health professionals are in full control of the care process. AI is never unchecked—it is always supported and reviewed by a professional. There are several other AI-assisted processes already in use to support day-to-day care delivery, including symptom checkers that help guide patients to the right level of care.
In the medium to short term, other potential applications of AI tools at Jefferson Health include improving the handoff process among nurses between shifts.
Another tool, dubbed AI Text Assistant “lives inside of Epic and allows you to highlight a section of text and say, ‘Make this patient-friendly,’ or ‘Convert this into bullets,’ or ‘Make this shorter,’” Dr. Babula said. “That's pretty cool.”
— Brian Justice contributed to this report.
