What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a computer system designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as recognizing images, understanding natural language and making predictions based on data.
The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what it can do has been all over the news lately. Generative AI tools, like ChatGPT or Bard, can create new content, such as images, text and music. It uses large amounts of existing data and applies rules to identify trends, then uses these patterns to generate new content that’s similar to the original data it analyzed. It’s also interactive — you can ask it a question, and it will confidently give you an answer. Unfortunately, like many things on the Internet, it may not be the correct answer, but it tries.
How can I keep data safe?
AI tools can be a great resource for you personally, but be sure to use them with caution.
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Never enter any Protected Health Information (PHI), Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or HM intellectual property information into public, generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard.
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For personal use, make sure there isn’t any personal or confidential information included in your prompts. You can also turn off the chat history and training which means the data you input won’t be used to train and improve the models.
How is Houston Methodist using AI?
Keeping security and privacy concerns top-of-mind, HM is assessing several opportunities to use AI technologies. Partnering with care.ai, we are currently piloting AI tools for patient monitoring for their position in bed and automated capturing of staff hourly rounding.
We’re also looking at how Pieces Predict, a health care data analytics tool, can be used to review patients’ charts and identify when and how teams can intervene in patient care earlier and more efficiently. Pieces Predict may also be used to identify discharge barriers and more accurately predict discharge dates.
Epic is actively looking at employing AI resources within daily workflows to help improve the accuracy of data within Epic and reduce documentation burdens and errors. In the future, AI may be used to automatically fill in missing information and provide insights that can improve care quality, reduce costs and allow clinicians more time to focus on their patients. A critical consideration is ensuring the algorithms used aren’t incomplete or biased — so they’re testing and validating processes extensively.
What is HM’s policy on AI use?
To protect HM patient information and intellectual property, System Policy IM01 Acceptable Use of Computing Resources (Policy IM01) has been revised to introduce new requirements around using generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Bard, etc.). You can only use these tools for authorized, HM business purposes and must never enter any confidential information into these tools, including patients’ PHI, PII or any HM proprietary information/trade secrets.
