Across Monument Health’s facilities, artificial intelligence is changing how clinicians work and how patients experience high-quality care. In daily practice, Monument Health employees already use more than a dozen applications of generative AI in the electronic health record. This reflects our commitment to ensuring that patients in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming have access to the same caliber of technology-driven care available at the nation’s largest academic medical centers. Clinician use of these AI tools is above the national average when compared to the major U.S. health systems that use the same electronic health record, Epic.
“Patients in the Black Hills deserve the same high-quality care they would receive in a major academic center,” said Patrick A. Woodard, M.D., Chief Information Officer at Monument Health. “By investing in these tools, we are enabling our clinicians to stay at the forefront of medicine and keep care close to home.”
The AI capabilities Monument Health has activated share a common thread: making critical health care information actionable and keeping clinicians focused on patients. When physicians have the right context at their fingertips and spend less time on documentation, they’re able to spend more quality time with their patients, listening, explaining and problem-solving together.
Across Monument Health’s 60 locations, AI-powered features like Inpatient and Outpatient Insights synthesize key patient information in the electronic health record so that clinicians can walk into every patient encounter feeling prepared and fully present. An AI-assisted radiology workflow extracts critical findings like lung nodules directly from radiology reports, helping ensure that patients receive timely follow-up care on incidental findings. Generative AI writing tools help clinicians ensure that their messages and instructions are in patient-friendly language, rather than medical jargon, and draft complex documents like hospital course summaries that have traditionally consumed significant physician time. These are just a few examples of what’s happening today.
“As a practicing internist, I’ve found that the biggest impact of AI isn’t replacing clinical judgment—it’s giving me back time and cognitive space,” said Burton Hayes, M.D., Director of Ambulatory Clinical Informatics at Monument Health. “Tools that generate clinical documentation from the patient conversation have dramatically reduced the hours I used to spend charting after work. AI can summarize chart data in seconds and suggest diagnoses or coding based on the visit. The result is that I spend less time doing clerical work and more time actually thinking about the patient in front of me. AI is helping me love being a doctor, rather than a data entry clerk.”
None of these capabilities replace clinical judgment. They remove friction around it, giving Monument Health’s caregivers more capacity to do what they entered health care to do. Monument Health is actively expanding its AI capabilities, with patient-facing applications on the near horizon.