Robots are roaming the hallways at El Camino Health, helping to deliver medications and take samples to the laboratory. They are among the new technologies implemented to improve efficiency while allowing clinicians to focus on patient care.

These technologies, which include artificial intelligence, are designed to help staff with menial tasks. El Camino Health operates hospitals in Los Gatos and Mountain View, California, as well as several urgent care clinics throughout Santa Clara County.

Chief information officer Deb Muro said AI has been assisting nurses and physicians with their tasks throughout the hospital for anywhere from a few months to a couple years.

“Whenever you implement AI, you’re implementing a model, and sometimes you need to train the model over time with more and more data,” Muro said. “You implement them, you pilot them, you try them out, you keep adjusting them, and you see the AI gets better and better because it learns from the data.”

One AI device is a deterioration index, which monitors a patient’s vital signs like temperature, blood pressure and respiratory rate, and predicts when a patient’s condition changes and notifies staff to send someone to check on them. Muro said its implementation has led to a drop in the percentage of events where patients need resuscitation.

“It has prevented and reduced the number of cases that have code blues,” she added. A code blue is called when a patient is in cardiac or respiratory arrest or has a life-threatening medical emergency that needs immediate attention.

El Camino also implemented AI to assess a patient’s fall risk. An algorithm predicts which patients are most at risk for falling, allowing nurses to intervene with those patients to prevent falls or reduce them from happening.

The radiology department also received a technological boost in the last year. Muro said AI is being used to analyze X-rays with an initial reading to help physicians prioritize patients. The AI can also pick up on incidental findings, other conditions that might not be easily visible.

Muro said the AI has detected incidental findings in 166 people, allowing them to be treated. The technology has also helped physicians to save an hour of work per shift.

Throughout El Camino’s hospitals and clinics, physicians can also have AI assist them with taking notes after a patient visit. Muro said physicians tend to write up their notes when they get home instead of spending time with their families. She said they are implementing AI to help keep doctors from having to do this work at home.

This ambient listening program takes notes during and after appointments. The doctor then reviews the note and can sign off on it. Muro said it is helpful for doctors because it saves time and improves accuracy, instead of forcing doctors to rely on their memory of the visit hours after it happened.

AI is also being used to help doctors draft messages to patients who send them questions. The questions might be about prescription refills or their condition. Muro said the AI will look through the chart and the doctor’s notes and draft a response for the doctor, which they can edit. She said this program has saved doctors time in writing responses and enabled them to answer their patients’ questions more quickly.

“Those two things are helping our physicians with becoming more efficient, and it also helps with the quality of the data, the information, because it helps bring that to the physicians’ view so they can then sign off on it,” Muro said.

El Camino Health has also implemented technology that keeps track of employees’ information – like how many hours they might have worked, if they worked any consecutive shifts or if their birthday is coming up – and alerts managers about any employees that may need extra attention. Muro said this has improved employee engagement , especially for nurses, based on surveys taken by staff.

Muro said El Camino Health is looking to implement AI in its call centers using virtual agents that can respond faster and improve employee efficiency.

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