Imagine the internet before the web browser. Mountains of useful information, inaccessible to “users.” That problem exists today within every hospital in the form of doctors’ Electronic Health Records (EHR) notes that are not available to patients or available but uninterpretable by patients and their families.

 

Increasingly patients now have access to their medical information via patient portals however the notes and information are not in a form patients and families can easily understand given they are written with the purpose of communicating with other providers and for documentation. By harnessing the power of the EHR and AI, these records can be translated to language that patients and families can understand with the goal of increased usability of the medical record with the hopes of increasing comprehension, improving provider and patient relationships, and empowering our patients with knowledge about their medical issues and plan. This session will focus on an artificial intelligence pilot conducted by members of the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Colorado Hospital that utilized this new technology to simplify patient notes while preserving key content. We will describe this novel technology and patients’ perceptions of the translated note.