Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Dedicated EHR Time Reduces After-Hours Work For Clinicians

A study of general internal medicine physicians from 2 ambulatory practice networks evaluated whether reserving protected time for EHR tasks—such as messaging, prior authorizations, or medication refills—affects physician productivity and hands-on EHR time. Researchers compared 130 general internal medicine physicians (41 in the intervention group and 89 in the control group) from November 2021 to June 2024 and set aside 1 appointment slot per half-day (20-30 minutes) dedicated to asynchronous EHR tasks. As published in …

More Than Half of Hospitals Embrace Generative AI

A national survey of 2,174 U.S. acute care hospitals found growing uptake of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools integrated with electronic health records (EHRs) in 2024, as published in JAMA Network Open. A total of 762 hospitals (31.5%) were considered “early adopters,” meaning they currently use integrated, generative AI. Another 24.7% say they plan to have implementation within a year (“fast followers”), suggesting that more than half of the hospitals surveyed would have adoption by …

Smartwatches Are Trustworthy AFib Screening Devices

Smartwatches do a good job of identifying atrial fibrillation, according to a meta-analysis in JACC. The authors considered data from 26 studies that included 17,349 participants and found that smartwatches detect atrial fibrillation with high accuracy. Overall sensitivity was 94.8%, and specificity was 96.4%. The accuracy of the results varied when comparing each individual device, however. According to the authors, Amazfit (99% sensitivity; 99% specificity) and Samsung (97% sensitivity; 96% specificity) models performed at the …

LLMs Save Time For ED Discharge Notes

When using a large language model (LLM) assistant for generating emergency department (ED) discharge notes at an academic 2,400-bed tertiary hospital in South Korea, physicians gained some worthwhile efficiencies, according to a comparative effectiveness study published in JAMA Network Open. Six emergency physicians created 300 manual notes, 300 LLM drafts, and 300 LLM-assisted notes from 50 patient cases, which were judged on a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5. Compared with manual documentation, LLM-assisted …

What Do You Tell Patients About Chatbots And Test Results?

Many patients are now using artificial intelligence (AI) tools with large language models to fill the information gap between the time their test results show up in their patient-facing health records—which could be the same day—and the time their clinicians provide personalized interpretation and next steps. Experts warn that the accuracy of AI chatbot information often depends on how the patients frame their questions and what details they input along the way. But it turns …

AI Scribes Reduce Clinician Burnout By 21%, Improve Well-Being By 30%

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate notes to document patient visits was linked to improvements in clinician burnout, as published in JAMA Network Open. Researchers surveyed 1,430 clinicians from 2 different health systems who used ambient documentation technology. They found physicians at Mass General Brigham reported a 21.2% absolute reduction in burnout with the tools, as the proportion of clinicians reporting burnout decreased from 50.6% to 29.4% at 42 days and from 52.6% to 30.7% …

Videos By Your Kid’s Physician May Encourage Pediatric Flu Vaccination

When a physician recommends an important health service, patients are more apt to listen, aren’t they? Maybe not. A randomized clinical trial of more than 22,233 patients published in JAMA Network Open tested whether personalized physician videos or infographics could raise the uptake of influenza vaccinations for adults and children. As it turned out, in the 2023-2024 respiratory virus season, vaccination rates were similar across groups: 46.9% with usual care, 48.0% with video, and 47.5% …

Will AI Discharge Summaries Help To Reduce Burnout?

AI-generated reports using large language models (LLMs) seem inevitable in healthcare, especially when it comes to the time-consuming task of writing up patient discharge summaries, a commentary post in JAMA Internal Medicine states. Right now, the responsibility of compiling summaries is one of the many administrative burdens leading to burnout among clinicians, and leveraging LLM tools could reduce that burden if done thoughtfully and with appropriate data integration. In a related article, researchers found no …

AI Model Triages Primary Care Cases To Specialty Care

In a study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model and tested its ability to assist in triaging referrals from primary care to specialized care. Evaluated against a reference standard, the AI tool achieved good overall accuracy of 0.716 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.694-0.737) of referrals with high specificity (0.801, 95%CI, 0.777-0.822) but lower sensitivity (0.542, 95%CI, 0.501-0.582). In other words, the AI model correctly classified 71.6% of referrals while …

Ransomware And Other Hacks On The Rise For Healthcare Industry

From 2010 to 2024, healthcare data breach incidents in the United States rose significantly, with the total number of reported breaches increasing from 216 to 566—a 162% rise. Ransomware-involved cyberattacks across all Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-covered entities increased from 0% of breaches in 2010 to 31% in 2021. However, by 2024, ransomware attacks more recently trended down to 11% of incidents (61 of the total 566 incidents for the year). Even more …

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