Northwestern Medicine Deploying AI-Based Clinical Decision Support

Clinical decision support is one of the most promising areas for generative AI deployment. For example, Northwestern Medicine just announced that it is integrating “David,” Tempus AI’s generative AI clinical co-pilot, within its EHR. Northwestern Medicine said its clinical teams will gain real-time, AI-enabled insights at every point of care to streamline complex treatment decisions.

Through the integration of David, Northwestern Medicine will adopt core parts of Tempus’ AI infrastructure to allow its AI applications to be underpinned by a multimodal patient record and to co-develop, deploy, and monitor AI algorithms and agents into the David experience.

Northwestern Medicine offered a list of things clinical teams will be able to do:
• Build custom AI agents tailored to Northwestern Medicine’s unique workflows, further enhancing efficiency and care quality.
• Query patient data across the EHR using natural language, surfacing relevant information in seconds.
• Automate pre-appointment preparation, with AI-generated patient summaries and treatment histories.
• Receive real-time support during appointments, including intelligent note-taking and key information highlights.
• Streamline post-appointment tasks, such as documentation, treatment planning, prior authorizations, and clinical trial matching.


“Through this expanded collaboration, we will have the ability to thoughtfully deploy AI in a way that will enhance our ability to provide care to our patients,” said Howard Chrisman, M.D., president and CEO of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, in a statement. “Providing our physicians and clinical care teams with data and relevant information in real-time, tailored to each patient, is the next leap forward in the delivery of care.”

“Northwestern Medicine was our first genomic sequencing partner almost 10 years ago, and together we led the field into generating multimodal data at scale. A decade later, we are now embarking on a new chapter that will demonstrate how generative AI can transform the way healthcare is delivered,” said Eric Lekfofsky, founder and CEO at Tempus (NASDAQ: TEM), in a statement. “The integration of David into Northwestern Medicine’s EHR is a major step forward in our mission to connect multiple data modalities and deliver actionable insights in real time.”

Other health IT leaders are considering similar approaches. In a recent interview, Sentara Health Chief Health Information Officer Joe Evans, M.D., said he thinks the next big opportunity for the players in the AI space is to create not only context-specific patient assessments, but then through clinical guidelines be able to offer the next best step in care, whether it be a medication or further testing. 

“All of our clinical decision support is mainly reactive — for instance, we realize we don't have enough patients on guideline-directed therapy for heart failure so we create decision support based on the guidelines,” Evans explained. “But that would just be the one problem we fixed, whereas this would be aggregating the American College of Cardiology and all the different big society guidelines and putting them in this corpus of knowledge. Then the AI has the ability to give that patient context, and be able to point to the corpus of knowledge that it was trained on and offer that next best step of care.”