Overcoming these organizational concerns and recognizing the opportunity for value is the essential first stage of AI maturity for any healthcare organization. Therefore, a critical initial step in gaining internal buy-in for AI healthcare deployments is ensuring that decision-makers are aware of the untapped value of unstructured EHR data. According to survey respondents, the top benefits sought from leveraging unstructured data are:

• Improved patient outcomes (39%)
• Improved customer service (33%)

• Improved customer experience (31%)
• Increased efficiency/productivity (28%)
• Lower operating costs (28%)

While those are compelling and tangible benefits, healthcare organizations need the right tools to extract value from unstructured data. Medical AI and large language models (LLM), purposely trained on clinical data and used in conjunction with human experts, are able to understand medical shorthand, clinicians’ notes, PDFs, and other forms of unstructured data. These technologies extract and translate this unstructured data into easily digestible information far more effectively than tools previously available on the market.

Willingness to work with partners
Healthcare organizations know they aren’t in the IT business. Consequently, it’s no surprise that 83% of respondents to the survey say they would consider working in some capacity with a technology vendor or other third party to extract insights from clinical unstructured data. Only 14% are using or planning to use internally developed tools to extract insights from unstructured data, with these respondents most frequently citing security and privacy concerns (43%) as their top reasons for going it alone.

Despite these concerns, the vast majority (94%) of survey respondents said they would be interested or extremely interested in beta testing with potential partners, placing a priority on accuracy, reliability, and healthcare industry expertise.

Conclusion
Healthcare organizations who have done the work to educate themselves on the business and clinical value hidden in unstructured data expect their investments in AI to yield returns within a couple of years. With the right tools and partners in place, these organizations will be able to scale their deployment of medical AI to extract unstructured data across their entire enterprise and leverage it to meet their revenue, cost takeout, and innovation goals.

About the author: Jaimes Blunt is the executive vice president of emtelligent.

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