Primary care physicians can spend up to six hours per workday interacting with electronic health records (EHR) to perform clerical and administrative tasks, including documentation, order entry, billing and coding. To facilitate and speed up these tasks and support physicians in their practice, CGI has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for its OMNI360 patient information system in Finland.
Kimmo Alaniska, Vice-President of Intellectual Property at CGI, says, “our goal is to find the most effective and widely accessible way to make the clinical work easier for healthcare professionals. Our experts investigated where professionals spend the most time, and we identified key areas where we could develop AI tools that provide support.”
Delegating tasks to the OMNI360 AI Assistant frees up time for healthcare professionals to spend valuable face-to-face time with their patients while contributing to reduced workload, improved professional satisfaction, and decreased burnout.
Enhanced understanding of patient history
CGI’s OMNI360 AI Assistant empowers healthcare professionals to easily familiarize themselves with their patients’ most relevant health and treatment history. Streamlining this time-consuming process can provide a deeper, more accurate depiction of a patient's clinical picture, improving the continuity of care, potentially decreasing the number of follow-up examinations, and reducing the overall workload for clinicians.
"An AI assistant that uses generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can compile a concise summary of the patient's illnesses and history, which the medical professional can scan in a fraction of the time it would take them to manually review historical data,” Alaniska explains.
The OMNI360 AI Assistant can extract relevant information from the patient history, including texts, documentation, imaging, and summary notes, to allow the attending physician to interrogate the data and immediately learn more about the patient’s health journey to date.
Furthermore, the OMNI360 AI Assistant understands context and the relationships within the data, to accurately respond to a variety of inquiries. For example, a physician may want to learn how balanced the patient’s diabetes has been over the past year. With a simple conversational prompt, the OMNI360 AI Assistant reviews the patient’s medical records, including blood tests measuring glucose and creatinine levels, weight changes, previous diagnoses, and any other event in the clinical history related to diabetes. The results include a concise response, including easily accessible links citing the original medical records.
Streamlined workflow through smarter voice and natural language recognition
Improved speech recognition and a more accurate understanding of natural written language is driving the automation of labor-intensive tasks and workflows. CGI’s OMNI360 AI Assistant can interpret spoken natural language prompts to create summaries based on a patient’s medical history. The platform can also create pre-filled documents and orders including medical certificates, and access user support guides that provide answers and direct links to applications.
CGI continues to enhance the platform, with a long-term goal of the OMNI360 AI Assistant becoming completely voice activated, removing the need for a keyboard or mouse in the user experience. A fully hands off approach will allow the physician to use voice commands to concurrently learn more about past medical history and better understand examination findings in real time, without interrupting the patient exam.
Our commitment to fostering responsible AI in healthcare and beyond
The OMNI360 AI Assistant aligns with CGI’s responsible use of AI best practices, ensuring a “human in the loop” approach. As a supporting tool rather than a replacement of the physician in the decision-making process, the OMNI360 AI Assistant supports tasks carried out in the patient information system, such as adding visit entries to the patient records. The clinician continues to be the authoritative lead, verifying records, certificates, and prescriptions, and making all treatment decisions. Maintaining the healthcare professional as the overall owner of the process—including auditing and interpreting data—ensures superior treatment quality and meaningful insights.
Building and using AI responsibly in healthcare requires guardrails, including protecting data privacy, security, intellectual property, and data rights. As a global business and IT consulting firm with clients worldwide, we are tracking ongoing legislation and developments to ensure that our own processes adapt to and comply with evolving regulatory requirements related to AI. Our practice is to consult with like-minded clients who can benefit from AI’s vast potential, who anticipate legislative impacts, and who want to be informed and proactive in terms of compliance.
AI has the potential to empower discovery and collaboration if we use it responsibly and ethically. Learn more about our participation in the EU AI Act Pledge and our commitment to fostering responsible AI development and deployment across all industries, including healthcare.
