From better regulation of AI in health, to click fatigue and outdated designs, the AMA president has told software vendors to help doctors embrace change.
Doctors are looking for clarity and guidance when it comes to digital health, says the president of the AMA, Dr Danielle McMullen.
A self-confessed “Luddite” Dr McMullen told a room full of software vendors at the Medical Software Industry Association’s Summit in Brisbane today, that although doctors could be “awful” at dealing with change, it was also true that they wanted to be consulted about the design and user experience of digital health tools, particularly AI scribes impacting their workflow.
“We’ve got a few questions about really, how do we implement AI safely, securely, and be all on the same page about what its role is in healthcare,” Dr McMullen said.
“We at the AMA think there needs to be some more risk-based regulation and a shared understanding of what are the use cases and what is the risk of those use cases, and how do we appropriately regulate for that.
“As doctors, we want to know the tools that we’re using have been validated in a safe and secure way so we can trust the programs.”
Dr McMullen said there needed to be “ideally, a dedicated governance body around health AI”.
“At the moment, the TGA has some regulatory scope to our medical devices, but increased clarity would really help us,” she said.
Seeking consent from patients to use AI scribes during consultations was also proving challenging for some clinicians, she said.
“There’s still some questions about privacy and security and how to most appropriately seek consent,” she said.
“We seek consent all the time – it’s the bread and butter of our job, but usually we really know the ins and outs of the risks.
“There is a number of our members who find it challenging to seek consent about a product that they don’t quite understand.”
Apart from AI scribes, Dr McMullen named three other hot digital health topics vexing doctors.
Click fatigue
The lack of a single sign-on and smooth authentication was problematic, she said.
“Doctors are being asked to access or input information into a variety of different clinical systems in every consultation, and that’s increasing,” she said.
“We have to report more about what we’re doing, the sources of information that we can and must seek intel from during a consultation [are increasing] and so that click burden is now significant.
“There’s still a long way to go for a single sign on, smooth authentication, smooth experience for practitioners, and therefore the patient sitting next to me, who doesn’t always understand what it is that we’re trying to get to on the computer.”
Frequent timeouts and log out systems that log doctors out after three minutes were disrupting consultations and taking time away from patient care, she said.
Cybersecurity
Despite evidence of healthcare in general and non-hospital providers being the biggest weak spots in terms of cybersecurity in the health system, most community practices still had physical servers “in the tea room and may or may not have appropriate governance around that data and management of that data”, said Dr McMullen.
“We need stronger security measures and we need that articulated back to the doctors who have governance of some of this data,” she said.
UI/UX
Some practice management systems have not changed the way they look for many years, Dr McMullen pointed out.
“I understand that doctors don’t like change,” she said.
“I understand that your customers tell you that they want everything to be better, but don’t change a thing about where I click and what I do.
“We [doctors] are pretty awful when it comes to trying to learn new things. But we all use a smartphone app.
“We will figure out how to use the new clinical software that [software vendors] design to make a workflow that actually works better.”
Engagement of doctors in the design of PMS software and other digital tools was crucial to not only improving performance but encouraging uptake of innovations in primary care, Dr McMullen said.
“I would encourage you to work with us as we try and get better,” she said.