Clinical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence: What the Working Emergency Physician Needs to Know

Clinical Informatics is wide-ranging field that engages with nearly every aspect of clinical care that is documented in the electronic health record (EHR). While studies from the informatics literature had been gradually introducing more sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques into clinical settings, the explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enticed both entrepreneurs and clinicians to rapidly introduce LLMs into the Emergency Department.

Clinical Informaticists possess a deep understanding of both the clinical significance and underlying architecture of clinical data. Misunderstanding how data is represented can pose significant hazards for clinical care, research, and AI systems. Despite the seemingly high performance of LLMs on some clinical measures, evidence for their ability to reason clinically is lacking, and they often provide confident, false answers. Emergency Physicians (EPs) who are board-certified in Clinical Informatics could be a natural constituency to help to integrate these technologies safely into the ED. However, there are very few EPs with this board-certification, due to high demand, few training programs, and a lack of visibility of the subspecialty.

LLMs and other AI systems are likely to play a growing role within the ED as technology improves and hospitals partner with commercial vendors. Working EPs need to have a strong understanding of the potential benefits and limitations of these technologies, and EPs with training in Informatics will play an essential role. Increasing exposure to Clinical Informatics within Emergency Medicine residencies and supporting EPs to go into Informatics fellowships is paramount.