EP 23 Dr. Benjamin Slovis, MD, MA, Temple Health
Making AI Work in the Hospital, Beyond the Pilot
Guest: Benjamin Slovis, MD, MA | Released 06/19/26
A promising demonstration is only the beginning of bringing AI into a hospital. Dr. Benjamin Slovis, Chief Medical Information Officer at Temple Health, joins DJ and Ethan to discuss the work that follows: understanding a clinical need, evaluating a tool, fitting it into the electronic health record, and helping people use it reliably. His perspective combines emergency medicine with clinical informatics, a field he approaches through the movement of information and the decisions that information needs to support.
Dr. Slovis describes how questions from emergency practice led him toward informatics, including the challenge of finding information about care delivered elsewhere. The electronic record can make information available while also demanding time for review, order entry, and documentation. He sees opportunities for AI to address parts of that burden, but starts with the problem a team is trying to solve. A vendor's promise of integration needs to become a concrete account of who will use the tool, when it will appear, and how much work implementation will require.
Moving beyond a pilot changes the questions. An enthusiastic first group can show what is possible, but broader adoption depends on colleagues with different habits and needs. Slovis uses Temple's ambient documentation work to describe that transition. He recounts clinicians' experiences of reduced documentation burden and explains the importance of people who try a tool after the initial pilot. He also distinguishes those experiences from proof of better patient outcomes. At the time of the interview, he describes the program's purpose as reducing clinician burden, without increasing expectations for patient volume.
Governance runs through the conversation. Different applications pose different risks, and a documentation tool requires a different evaluation from software intended to identify a clinical finding. Slovis discusses clinician oversight, decision-support governance, and preserving the ability to disagree with a recommendation. He also raises questions vendors should be prepared to answer about training data and validation. A result from one population may not establish usefulness in another, making local evaluation and continued review part of implementation.
Ethics and education bring additional perspectives into that process. Slovis describes the contribution of ethicists to Temple's evolving governance work, including questions about language and fairness in a proposed tool for feedback on student notes. He is clear that this educational example is an idea, not a deployed program. The group also discusses collaboration with training leaders and a policy allowing senior residents to use ambient documentation with their program director's agreement. Learning to assess and use new tools must sit alongside developing the clinical skills those tools are meant to support.
The hosts open the episode with Anthropic's Project Glasswing and the implications of AI for cybersecurity in health care. That discussion considers the dependence of clinical work on functioning software and the challenges facing hospitals with limited technical resources. The interview returns to a related operational question: will a system work when people actually need it? Slovis closes with examples of why useful innovation depends on workflow, human judgment, and careful attention to ordinary details, including whether a replacement for a pager can wake the person carrying it.
What we cover
• 🏥 Clinical informatics and the information behind emergency decisions
• 🔌 What meaningful EHR integration requires from a hospital
• 🎙️ Scaling ambient documentation beyond enthusiastic pilot users
• ⚖️ Matching evaluation and oversight to a tool's clinical purpose
• 🌍 Vendor transparency, local populations, and equitable implementation
• 🎓 Ethics, trainee feedback, and learning to use ambient tools
• 🛡️ AI cybersecurity and the reliability of clinical infrastructure
Resources discussed
• Project Glasswing, Anthropic's April 2026 announcement discussed in the hosts' opening segment. The conversation reflects the information available at recording.
Connect with Dr. Slovis
Temple Health physician profile
