'Healthcare leaders revisit ‘trust but verify’ in the age of AI'

 In tandem with AI’s effect on the healthcare workforce, hospital executives are recalibrating how employees learn to do their jobs and what that shift demands of their leaders.

Tim Calahan, founder and managing member of EHC Consulting and former chief technology officer at Ann Arbor-based Michigan Medicine, was teaching a graduate-level cybersecurity course when ChatGPT launched. 

“It was amazing how much better the papers got,” he said. “And I laughed because I kind of knew what was going on in the background. There were no tools to understand what material AI was being used, so I had to retrain. I had to rethink: Well, how do I grade these papers?” 

He said that adaptability now applies to clinicians and staff reviewing AI-generated drafts inside an EHR. The previous default was to produce the content oneself, while the new one has to be verifying someone else’s output. 

“There’s a different flow and there’s a different meaning of your brain in terms of what I need to focus on and what I need to be interested in,” he said.

Beth Hand, interim vice president of care delivery applications at Oklahoma City-based OU Health, said entry- level jobs used to double as informal training grounds. 

“There’s no longer this journey where you start as a junior employee and you have all these repetitive tasks that actually teach you how to do your job, that teach you what to look for, where you learn your trending, where you learn the gaps, and you learn to understand what is right and what is wrong,” she said. 

As AI absorbs more repetitive work, Ms. Hand said the informal apprenticeship built into those tasks has to be rebuilt. 

“You still need a mentor, you still need a coach, you still need a preceptor,” she said.

She pointed to her own daughter, a college student who used Microsoft Copilot as part of a business course, as an example of how differently the next generation is being trained compared to her own path through school.

For Gary Zimmer, MD, chief medical officer at Utica, N.Y.-based Mohawk Valley Health System, the primary concern is about whether employees question information, regardless of its source. Recalling the release of the original iPhone in 2007, Dr. Zimmer said the device’s impact was a reminder that no leader today can confidently predict where AI tools will be in a few years. That uncertainty makes it more important that new workers keep learning to think critically. 

“If we don’t have the next generation coming out learning how to think and how to understand that, and they don’t understand the underlying methodology, you’ll reach a point where people aren’t going to question what they’re seeing,” he said. “And when that happens, then the ‘trust but verify’ goes away.”

Ms. Hand described that same phrase as the throughline she would want any healthcare employee to carry into their work now. 

“You no longer can just assume that it is correct,” she said, pointing to recent public reporting on AI hallucinations as a reason the habit matters more than ever.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ai/healthcare-leaders-revisit-trust-but-verify-in-the-age-of-ai/