CHARLOTTE — An area health care system said it wants to make sure you get through the emergency room quickly, and they are using new technology to do so.
Channel 9′s Dashawn Brown spoke to doctors at Novant Health who are encouraging the use of this new equipment.
Brown said the new software has been in use for just under two months, and the chief medical officer said they were able to see its benefits within the first two days.
“It’s almost like having an autopilot that helps you and gives you navigation as the pilot,” Dr. Eric Eskioglu, executive vice president and chief medical and scientific officer of Novant Health, said.
Eskioglu said the new technology, currently in use at Novant Presbyterian, is utilizing artificial intelligence.
He said the new software helps to scrub through crucial imaging like X-rays and CT scans in the ER.
Eskioglu said this could help flag the most urgent cases to move those patients to the front of the line.
“So if it’s a brain bleed. If it’s, God forbid, lung cancer. If it’s a pulmonary embolus. It actually puts it on top of the queue. It automatically prioritizes for the physicians to read,” Eskioglu said.
This technology comes at a time when emergency rooms in the Charlotte region and across the country have been battling overcrowding, as well as employee burnout.
“Especially during the four waves of the COVID pandemic, and we continue to go through these waves, you have to understand we also take care of other patients that are not COVID-related, and so we have been overwhelmed. So this will give us another tool, it’s an added tool. It’s not one solution (to) fix everything. It also helps with our physician burnout because now they don’t have that anxiety thinking, ‘OK, what in this reading panel that I have 50 patients or 100 patients, which one is going to be that ticking time bomb?’” Eskioglu said.
For all the advantages this new software could bring to patient care, Eskioglu said the new tech won’t replace staff. It will assist them instead.
“At the end of the day, the pilot still flies that plane, is in charge of that plane. Makes the decisions. But he gets a lot of extra information that he would not be able to do by himself,” Eskioglu said.
Eskioglu said patients don’t have to ask for this service because it’s already part of the workflow.
Right now, the technology is available at Novant Presbyterian, but leaders said the goal is to expand the technology throughout the entire system.
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