AI at UC San Diego Health
From faster diagnoses to more personalized treatment, learn how artificial intelligence (AI) is making your health care better and safer at UC San Diego Health.
We recognize AI's powerful potential to enhance patient care and outcomes and understand the importance of using it responsibly. That's why we maintain a strong commitment to patient privacy, safety, equity and ethical standards. Every AI tool is carefully evaluated to ensure it supports — not replaces — your care team's expertise.
What Is AI in Health Care?
AI refers to tools that provide insights from data. It helps our teams provide world-class care that's tailored to your needs.
You may be familiar with AI through popular technologies like ChatGPT. At UC San Diego Health, all our AI tools are used under strict security and privacy standards and tested to ensure that they are safe and effective.
AI doesn't replace your care team's expertise or judgment. Instead, your care team may use AI to check that important information isn't missed, so that you receive the best care possible.
There are two common types of AI:
- Predictive AI: Helps our teams be in the right place at the right time
- Generative AI: Helps our teams communicate and document care in a timely manner.
Predictive AI
What Is Predictive AI?
Predictive AI refers to tools that estimate the risk of an event — such as developing a severe illness — which we can use to identify people who may need additional care. For example, at UC San Diego Health, we use AI in our emergency rooms to quickly identify patients at risk for sepsis infection, which has been shown to improve patient outcomes.
How Does Predictive AI Work?
Predictive AI models are trained to predict outcomes based on examples of real patient data and their results. When used in clinical care, AI models generate predictions — often expressed as the risk of an outcome — which are shared with clinical team members who may use these predictions with other information to support care decisions.
Generative AI
What Is Generative AI?
Generative AI refers to tools that draft clinical notes or secure messages under the guidance of your care team, helping them work more efficiently. For example, we use generative AI capabilities within our electronic health record system to improve our team's communication with patients.
How Does Generative AI Work?
Generative AI models are trained on information from the internet and other sources to create text based on instructions. These models are then tailored for health care through detailed prompts or additional training on medical data — a process known as fine-tuning. Depending on the instructions, generative AI can help our teams draft clinical notes or respond to patient messages.
Your Privacy and Safety Come First
At UC San Diego Health, we value your safety and privacy. That's why we carefully review all significant uses of AI to ensure they are appropriate, ethical, accurate and reliable.
A multidisciplinary group evaluates both current and proposed AI tools to ensure they align with our priorities and respect the community we serve. We also conduct cybersecurity reviews of all AI technology to protect your data, following strict University of California privacy and security standards. We are transparent about our use of AI and provide clear information about how it's applied wherever appropriate.
We Strive to Use AI Responsibly
Here are our responsible AI principles, and what they mean for patients. Our AI use follows these guidelines.
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Appropriateness AI isn’t always the right solution. We evaluate whether it’s the right tool for the specific use case and workflow.
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Transparency We require clear information from vendors and developers about how tools work so we can make informed decisions about their use.
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Accuracy We evaluate AI tools to ensure that they are accurate enough to be useful.
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Reliability We monitor AI tools to ensure they continue to work effectively over time, especially as models are updated.
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Safety We evaluate AI tools to ensure that they do not produce information or guidance that could lead to unsafe care.
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Fairness We evaluate the ability of AI tools to serve our diverse patient population.
How We Use AI at UC San Diego Health
AI helps us transform patient care, diagnostics and operational efficiency in several ways.
Helping Our Teams Provide Safer, High-Quality Care
We use AI-powered tools to help detect signs of infections, cancer, heart disease or neurological conditions earlier. For example:
- Sepsis surveillance: A sepsis AI tool helps our Emergency Department quickly identify patients who are at risk for sepsis infection.
- Quality measurement: A generative AI tool helps our quality team accurately measure our quality of care in a timely manner.
Helping Our Teams Be More Efficient
AI helps doctors and nurses focus more on patients by reducing paperwork and highlighting key information.
AI-Drafted Notes
Our teams use an AI notetaking tool — with patients' permission — to draft summaries during clinical visits. These summaries capture what was discussed and serve as a starting point for clinical notes. Early results show that AI transcription tools help save time while capturing accurate information.
AI-Supported Patient Messaging
UC San Diego Health was one of the first health systems nationwide to use generative AI to draft responses to patient messages in the Epic electronic health record system. This tool helps clinicians provide timely, comprehensive replies. Its use is optional, giving our teams the flexibility to use AI only when it helps them provide better care.
A Health System Working for You
We have a Mission Control team monitoring patient flow throughout our hospitals, operating rooms and the discharge process to ensure timely and efficient care. AI forecasting models help us anticipate especially busy days, for example, so that hospitalized patients can be assigned a room as quickly as possible after admission.
Frequently asked questions
