Hospitals and AI: Balancing innovation and caution

Hospitals and health systems are adopting artificial intelligence into their organizations, and they face a host of questions as they look to expand their use of AI.

Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, recently spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® in a wide-ranging interview about some of the challenges facing hospitals.

Pollack is stepping down this year, and the hospital association is searching for his successor. But he says that the next leader will also have to confront “new forms of innovation that provide opportunities but also have to be guarded against.”

“I'm talking, of course, about AI,” Pollack says.

“We have to figure out new ways to deliver care, because we have workforce shortages that are going to continue, and new models of providing the care will be really important,” he says.

Pollack is enthusiastic about the potential for AI to help hospitals manage some administrative tasks more efficiently and ease some headaches for staff.

But Pollack suggests health systems must be more cautious when it comes to bringing AI technology into patient care. And he says it’s not easy to manage the balance of harnessing AI’s promise while also maintaining some guardrails.

And he notes it’s especially challenging to make policy when ti comes to AI “because it's rapidly changing.

“I think that when it comes to AI, what we're seeing is a lot of people focusing on efficiencies that you can achieve on the administrative side, and those, frankly, have already been in place for some time, and whether it's scheduling, staffing, … how we make the whole billing system more transparent and more efficient and more consumer friendly. I think that that part is well underway,” he says.

“On the clinical side, that's where we have to be particularly careful when it comes to how it's used for diagnostics,” Pollack says.

He sees AI as a tool for clinicians, and says that’s where it has value. But he doesn’t see the technology replacing clinicians.

“I'm skeptical that you can just sort of replace clinical judgment with artificial intelligence, and that's where you need to have the guardrails,” Pollack says.

“There needs to be transparency among what goes into these systems, so that you know what elements there are to ensure that you have the appropriate information being fed in,” he says. “And you've heard stories about hallucinations …. that's why it's a tool. But it's not the final determinant.”

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