Anesthesiologist Andrew Fisher, MD, assistant professor at Medical University of South Carolina, last week published a thoughtful article, “The Perioperative AI Reality Check: Why Hospital Tech Fails Without Clinician Co-Design.”
The opinion piece in healthcare technology news publication HIT Consultant views “AI-powered solutions” for perioperative care through the same lens as what he calls other perioperative “technology promises” he’s experienced that failed to deliver, such as EHR modules that didn’t actually streamline workflow but made it more cumbersome, intelligent scheduling systems “that didn’t account for clinical realities,” and patient portals “that patients didn’t use.”
“The problem wasn’t the technology,” he writes. “It was that most solutions were designed by people who’d never worked inside a hospital, let alone an operating room. They didn’t understand the difference between what looks good in a demo and what actually works when you’re managing 40 patients a day with an understaffed clinic.”
He writes that AI is different, however, because “it could address the actual problems we face and not the problems vendors think we have … The technology to fix perioperative care coordination already exists. The question isn’t ‘can AI help?’ It’s ‘why are we still accepting systems that don’t?’”
According to Dr. Fisher, successful perioperative tech solutions should:
He stresses that clinician involvement in perioperative tech development and implementation is imperative for success. Failure occurs, he says, when “leadership picks solutions in a vacuum. Someone in IT or the C-suite evaluates vendors, checks boxes on a feature list, and signs a contract. The clinicians who’ll actually use the system find out after the decision is made. Unsurprisingly, adoption is poor. Nobody accounts for change management.”
Read Dr. Fisher’s compelling arguments in full here.
