Stanford Medicine physicians have a new artificial intelligence tool to assist them when they message patients about test results. The technology drafts an interpretation of clinical test and lab results and explains them in a message using plain language, which a physician then reviews and approves. The technology adds to a growing number of AI-based tools poised to help physicians spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on more meaningful work, such as interacting with patients.

Artificial intelligence has tremendous promise to enhance the experience of both patients and clinicians in the health care setting — and this tool is one of many ways that we are unlocking that potential, said David Entwistle, president and CEO of Stanford Health Care. At Stanford Medicine, we are proud to be at the forefront of implementing responsible AI in clinical care, with a focus on advancing and empowering better health for all.

The tool, built in-house, leverages Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet LLM through Amazon Bedrock, an Amazon Web Services service for building, deploying and scaling generative AI applications. The tool follows a model similar to the AI-powered draft message generator that creates responses to patient inbox messages for health care providers. When a physician orders a test for a patient, be it blood work, an X-ray, a biopsy or something else, the results appear as medical data without interpretation.

By law, those results must be shared with the patient as soon as they’re ready, but the descriptions are often highly technical and can be challenging to understand without a medical degree. That means physicians are tasked with translating the results for their patients. Millions of lab tests are ordered annually by physicians for their patients, said Aditya Bhasin, vice president of software design and development at Stanford Health Care. By generating draft responses for our physicians, we not only assist them with that workload, but also provide timely, comprehensive comments to help patients understand their specific results.

Source: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/01/ai-test-results.html