Photo: SDI Productions/Getty Images
New York-based Mount Sinai Health System has announced that it will deploy OpenEvidence, an artificial intelligence-powered medical search and clinical decision-support platform, across its seven hospitals.
Pharmacists, registered nurses and physicians will all have access through the workflow integration, said Nicholas Gavin, Mount Sinai's vice president and chief clinical innovation officer.
WHY IT MATTERS
OpenEvidence is Mount Sinai's first enterprise-wide AI deployment across clinical roles, according to the health system's announcement this week.
Care team members can ask medical questions in natural language and receive consistent answers grounded in peer-reviewed literature and clinical guidelines within their existing Epic workflow. They will not need to toggle between different applications or external databases to get their questions answered, Mount Sinai said.
The technology could help address cognitive burdens, Gavin said.
"At Mount Sinai, we prioritize innovation that solves core clinical problems and scales across the entire delivery system," he said.
Ensuring that rigorously sourced, evidence-based AI insights are "clinically meaningful" was also a priority, added Dr. Girish Nadkarni, chief AI officer and chair of the Windreich Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai.
"This collaboration reflects our broader vision to responsibly scale AI across the health system in a way that enhances clinical decision-making, reduces cognitive burden and ultimately improves outcomes for our patients," he said.
THE LARGER TREND
Earlier this year, California-based Sutter Health also announced that it would integrate OpenEvidence into doctors' Epic workflows to support clinical decision-making.
"Patients benefit when providers have the most current and relevant evidence incorporated into clinical decision-making," said Dr. Ashley Beecy, Sutter Health's chief AI officer, in a statement at the time.
OpenEvidence said in February that it has added clinical trial matching within its clinical decision support platform to help care teams find accessible, medically appropriate options for patients. It filters trials by study design, enrollment status and geographic proximity.
For health systems that have clinical decision support systems that exist outside of their EHRs, Microsoft added more AI features to Dragon Copilot to not only enhance documentation accuracy and automate repetitive tasks for nurses and other clinical staff, but also to surface clinical insights at the point of care.
This year's enhancements include a unifying EHR-agnostic widget that works across a health system's clinical applications and knowledge bases to provide content and answer questions from multiple sources within existing workflows.
ON THE RECORD
"Our partnership with OpenEvidence is a vital step in democratizing access to the latest clinical evidence for every member of the Mount Sinai care team," said Gavin in a statement. "We are committed to equipping our clinicians with intuitive, AI-powered tools that reduce the cognitive burden of information retrieval and allow them to focus on what matters most – the patient."
"This agreement is our first to expand access to the entire care team, including all Mount Sinai nurses and pharmacists," added Daniel Nadler, OpenEvidence's CEO and founder. "This is the new baseline for what a modern hospital looks like."
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
