Oct 26, 2026 · 18 min · 8 segments
Hackensack Meridian Health recently became the first health system to earn The Joint Commission's Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare Certification. On *The Gist Healthcare Podcast*, Joel Klein, MD…
So Hackensack Meridian recently became the first health system to earn the Joint Commission's Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare certification.
Now, before we get into the certification itself, how has your organization's approach to AI evolved as these technologies have become, you know, more integrated into healthcare?
Yeah, the best way to answer it is to say that it's been a long, gradual journey.
It's something that you need to evolve into, both in terms of how leaders look at the technology, in terms of how our clinicians look at it and interact with it and weave it into their daily clinical life, and in terms of the oversight of the technology.
A few years ago, it started to become more widespread that you would have these tools that could help predict patients who were going to have some kind of an outcome or other.
In some cases it was, you know, that they were going to get sepsis, which is an overwhelming, you know, bloodstream infection that can be fatal.
or that they weren't going to show up for, you know, an outpatient appointment or that they were going to deteriorate, you know, in the hospital or have, you know, some kind of outcome that, you know, in theory could be averted.
And so this was the era of machine learning, right? So sort of the predecessor to what we think of now as AI.
And it was the same set of issues that we're seeing with AI today, only it was a few years ago.
Because you'd have these tools and you would put them into the organization And you have experienced doctors and nurses who are very used to looking at patients and saying, I don't think this person has sepsis or I know this person.
So how are you coming up with that? And so it's this idea of how do you look at something and what do you do with it mentally? How do you use it as a decision aid, but not sort of follow it slavishly and start everyone on antibiotics or overbook every appointment or essentially throw your years of clinical training and experience to the wind and just do whatever the computer says.
And it's not a black and white thing, right? It's a, well, maybe they have sepsis.
So Hackensack Meridian recently became the first health system to earn the Joint Commission's Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare certification.
Now, before we get into the certification itself, how has your organization's approach to AI evolved as these technologies have become, you know, more integrated into healthcare?
Yeah, the best way to answer it is to say that it's been a long, gradual journey.
It's something that you need to evolve into, both in terms of how leaders look at the technology, in terms of how our clinicians look at it and interact with it and weave it into their daily clinical life, and in terms of the oversight of the technology.
A few years ago, it started to become more widespread that you would have these tools that could help predict patients who were going to have some kind of an outcome or other.
In some cases it was, you know, that they were going to get sepsis, which is an overwhelming, you know, bloodstream infection that can be fatal.
or that they weren't going to show up for, you know, an outpatient appointment or that they were going to deteriorate, you know, in the hospital or have, you know, some kind of outcome that, you know, in theory could be averted.
And so this was the era of machine learning, right? So sort of the predecessor to what we think of now as AI.
And it was the same set of issues that we're seeing with AI today, only it was a few years ago.
Because you'd have these tools and you would put them into the organization And you have experienced doctors and nurses who are very used to looking at patients and saying, I don't think this person has sepsis or I know this person.
So how are you coming up with that? And so it's this idea of how do you look at something and what do you do with it mentally? How do you use it as a decision aid, but not sort of follow it slavishly and start everyone on antibiotics or overbook every appointment or essentially throw your years of clinical training and experience to the wind and just do whatever the computer says.
And it's not a black and white thing, right? It's a, well, maybe they have sepsis.
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