Artificial intelligence is changing the way healthcare is delivered—from helping doctors detect cancer to helping nurses respond to patients before they even get out of bed. Inside some TriHealth hospital rooms, a small white device mounted near the ceiling offers a glimpse into that future. (WKRC)
CINCINNATI (WKRC) — Artificial intelligence is changing the way healthcare is delivered—from helping doctors detect cancer to helping nurses respond to patients before they even get out of bed.
Inside some TriHealth hospital rooms, a small white device mounted near the ceiling offers a glimpse into that future.
The technology uses cameras to track a patient’s movements and connects with nurses at a central hub. The goal is to recognize when a patient may need assistance and allow staff to intervene before there is a fall or other problem.
TriHealth CEO Terri Hanlon-Bremer said nurses can “see what the patient is doing” and determine what intervention may be needed proactively.
The virtual nursing technology is just one example of how artificial intelligence is being integrated across TriHealth.
Local 12’s Meghan Mongillo sat down with Hanlon-Bremer to discuss how the rapidly evolving technology is changing healthcare—and what the health system is doing to protect patients and their privacy along the way.
AI helping doctors detect cancer:
The potential impact stretches well beyond the hospital room.
TriHealth operates five hospitals and more than 130 sites of care across the region. Hanlon-Bremer, who took over as CEO June 1, said artificial intelligence is increasingly being used on the clinical side of the organization.
“From a clinical perspective, we’re able to use AI to help identify cancers, when somebody may not know that they have cancer, or to help our radiologists as they’re going through multiple scans,” Hanlon-Bremer said.
That can mean using automated analysis to flag an abnormal spot on a medical image so a physician can take a closer look.
TriHealth Chief Information Officer Donna Peters said the health system has spent the past three years making significant investments in the infrastructure needed to support AI.
One area where she says the technology is already showing significant potential is medical imaging.
“The number of slices and images that these things take, it’s really hard for a human to get through that,” Peters said.
AI can help bring potentially abnormal images to the forefront, allowing physicians to concentrate on areas that may need additional attention.
“It brings those things that are not normal to the front so that the physicians can focus on those things that don’t look normal so they can address them earlier,” Peters said.
From reacting to problems to preventing them:
The technology is also helping TriHealth rethink how quickly healthcare workers can respond to patients.
Sensors, cameras and other smart technology can provide information about what’s happening with a patient in real time.
Instead of waiting for a patient to fall, for example, technology could alert nurses to movement that indicates a patient is trying to get out of bed and may need assistance.
For a healthcare industry facing growing demand and workforce pressures, Hanlon-Bremer also sees AI as a way to reduce some of the repetitive work employees currently perform.
The idea isn’t to remove people from healthcare, she said, but to allow technology to handle certain tasks so employees can focus their skills where they’re needed most.
Mongillo asked Hanlon-Bremer what that could look like five years from now.
“We’ll be able to create agentic AI agents that help us with our workload so that the human being, the human worker, can actually do the human work that needs to be done,” Hanlon-Bremer said. “Because at the end of the day, we’re in a human connectedness business.”
What happens to patient privacy?
But putting cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence into healthcare also raises an important question: What happens to patients’ private information?
When asked about concerns surrounding both the accuracy of AI and patient privacy as the technology becomes more prevalent Hanlon-Bremer replied, “AI is here. The good thing I would say to folks is that in healthcare, we are governed by a lot of laws, HIPAA predominantly.”
Hanlon-Bremer said protecting patient information must be part of any technology the health system implements.
“There’s nothing we can do or implement in our system that doesn’t ensure patient privacy,” she said.
The technology will continue to evolve, and TriHealth leaders expect its role inside hospitals and doctors’ offices to grow with it.
But even as more of healthcare becomes powered by artificial intelligence, TriHealth says the ultimate goal is to give its doctors, nurses and other employees more time for something that isn’t artificial at all—human connection.
