Randy Brandt, PA-C, leads AI project at Mile Bluff

Over the past several months, Randy Brandt, PA-C, has been working directly with some of the biggest names in healthcare and technology—MEDITECH and Google—to launch a new AI program at Mile Bluff Medical Center in Mauston, WI.

"When I was tasked as the project lead for an ambitious new AI project at Mile Bluff, I knew I had a lot of people counting on me; after all, this was something that had never been rolled out anywhere, let alone our community health system," said Brandt. "This project will not only have a major impact on our community but could lay the foundation for tackling a daunting issue facing the whole medical community—provider burnout."

To help with the issue of provider burnout, Mile Bluff has been working to deploy MEDITECH’s Expanse Search and Summarization, powered by Google Health. It is designed to use natural language processing to intelligently pull information from structured and unstructured data in the electronic health record system. This includes items like scanned documents and faxes.

"A lot of the tools that we have historically used to organize information and our thoughts no longer work as well because the volume and complexity of data have grown so fast," said Peter Clardy, Google Health Senior Staff Clinical Specialist. "The reason we have developed this new tool is to help better organize information in a way that allows efficient understanding."

The goal of the new search and summarization tool is to ultimately enable healthcare providers to quickly locate the information they need in a matter of seconds, versus searching through hundreds of pages of charts to find the most meaningful data. Understanding medical records more quickly and comprehensively will also make it less likely that something gets missed.

"We are truly grateful to be working with a very forward-thinking organization like Mile Bluff," added Clardy. "Our partnership has been remarkable, and we continue to learn an enormous amount."

Learn more about Mile Bluff's work with MEDITECH and Google.

Mile Bluff clinicians save 7.5 minutes in prep per patient with help from Meditech AI

The Impact of Search and Summarization at Mile Bluff Medical Center