The healthcare industry is buzzing about AI, especially its ability to automate time-consuming work. But the promise of AI isn’t just about speed, it offers the opportunity to create more meaningful connections between patients and healthcare providers. Through my experience with ambulatory practices, I’ve witnessed how administrative burdens overwhelm highly skilled providers, and I’m excited about the potential of how AI can help.

With physicians dedicating approximately one-third of their work hours to electronic health records and administrative duties, the pursuit of enhanced clinician support remains essential.

Virtual medical assistants (VMAs) represent one of the most promising emerging technologies. These AI-driven solutions will do more than reduce provider workload—they will transform health IT systems into even more valuable resources. This transformation creates opportunities for more meaningful and effective patient-provider encounters.

Let’s explore the potential impact VMAs could have on healthcare delivery.

The promise of AI isn’t just about speed, it offers the opportunity to create more meaningful connections between patients and healthcare providers.

Alleviating burden

Today, just to understand a patient’s full history, providers often must click through multiple electronic health record (EHR) tabs. As this can take minutes of manual searching, it distracts from face-to-face time with patients.

With VMAs integrated with the EHR, this technology changes the dynamics we know from top to bottom. But benefits go beyond just chart summarization. This technology propels answering the exact clinical questions a provider has in the moment like, “Has this patient ever had a certain medication, and if so, why was it stopped?” These more specific and tailored prompts help clinicians cut through clutter and surface insights most relevant to what they’re seeing—and deciding—right now. And no providers need to learn how to code in the meantime.

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Standards of care maintained

VMAs’ flexible design enables the same level of customization and personalization found in consumer industries like e-commerce and banking.

Practices can create templates for their most common chronic conditions, automatically displaying key metrics whenever a provider accesses a patient record with that condition. This condition-specific display presents providers with relevant data points and trends immediately, eliminating the need to manually request these insights from the system.

Practices can also define their own care protocols for different medical conditions. VMAs can then assess whether a patient’s ongoing treatment aligns with these established protocols. Although AI serves to enhance clinical decision-making, healthcare professionals retain ultimate responsibility for all medical choices.

Focusing where it matters

Virtual medical assistants bring about an entirely new way that AI can support care delivery. They will enable clinicians to spend more time with their patients and less time manually working with their technology. By anticipating needs and cutting through chart clutter, they have the potential to make care more efficient, more personalized and ultimately, more human.

At Altera, we’re embedding these innovations into TouchWorks® EHR to help clinicians spend more time with patients and less time navigating systems. Solutions like TouchWorks Note+ generate notes based on clinical encounters that providers can easily review before completion, without manual data entry. Discover how TouchWorks EHR is enabling practices to provide the experiences and outcomes patients and providers want here.