In the early days of electronic health record (EHR) introduction, digital voice applications were largely relegated to accurately transcribing spoken information. The doctor was tied to his desktop computer and limited to error-prone solutions without the ability to learn from his own shortcomings.
Berwadi Srikanth, Vice President of Suki Product Design: ©Suki
A decade later, smart voice applications like Siri and Alexa have become commonplace in today’s consumer car, home, and office environments. We are entering the world of conversational AI in earnest, with great promise for healthcare delivery.
A recent study by Voicebot.ai found that the use of voice assistants in healthcare has grown from just under 20 million adults in the US in mid-2019 to a whopping 54.5 million by 2021. State-of-the-art voice assistants can now process information with 99 functions. Get % (or better) accuracy even if the doctor’s native language is not English.
And the good news is that the industry is just scratching the surface of what is possible with voice. No matter how you look at it, the best is yet to come. New voice capabilities are expected to roll out in the coming months and years, offering once-unimaginable benefits to physicians and healthcare systems as they navigate major challenges.
gain momentum
Today’s advanced voice assistants are much closer to being real “assistants” than their predecessors. Physicians can speak directly to doctors, send various commands, or simply speak out findings and recommendations, and voice applications have the ability to respond as well. So today’s doctors can more easily access information such as detailed drug interaction lists, up-to-date patient medical histories, and emergency department availability, whether they’re on the road, at home, or wherever they are. .
These advances have led to increased time savings for clinicians nationwide. His 2021-22 pilot study by the AAFP showed that, on average, using a voice-enabled AI assistant reduced his median time spent writing documents per month by 72%. 3.3 hours per week.
Given the accelerated clinical burnout in recent years since the onset of the pandemic, this is a major issue. Many doctors, such as Dr. Elizabeth Gough of Virginia, say voice saves them time, allowing them to remain employed full-time instead of working fewer hours. Save time spent typing with the ability to create notes using your mobile device’s voice assistant and sync them to your EHR.
Significant time savings for physicians means they can repurpose that time for patient care activities or close their laptops an hour earlier at the end of the day.
The importance of these benefits is game-changing. But these features are also stimulating physicians’ desire for more.
What Happens Next and Why It Matters
The next iteration of more advanced and intelligent voice assistants is coming to address future strains, including a shortage of healthcare providers in every healthcare setting. His August 2022 physician survey by STAT and the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) revealed that in four of his last 10 medical practices, physicians resigned or retired early due to burnout. rice field.
On the one hand, the pressure to do more with less is excessive. As the American Hospital Association noted in a recent report, the pandemic is “doing tremendous damage to hospitals and healthcare systems and placing a tremendous burden on the nation’s healthcare workers,” and by 2021 hospital labor costs increased by 19.1% compared to pre-infection. Pandemic level in 2019.
For all these reasons and more, medical leaders expect the next wave of voice solutions to be even smarter than today’s generation. To achieve this vision, voice technology must go beyond simple “command and response” capabilities and become more intuitive, with the ability to hear and decipher critical information. Many of these so-called “ambient” features, which allow doctors to speak naturally during conversations and allow “assistants” to filter through large amounts of data to find the “golden” content of what they are saying, are still happening. I haven’t been able to. without it Humans are working behind the scenes to decipher the information. However, the presence of humans behind the scenes raises privacy concerns. It can also significantly increase costs.
Luckily, we have a ready-to-market out-of-the-box solution that can create a “real” human presence, produce human assistant-like deliverables, and doesn’t require back-end support. We are getting closer to having a viable ambient audio solution.
Having a voice assistant capable of functioning at this level means doctors no longer need to send commands such as “Can I see your list of allergies?” They just need to say out loud, “Will you pay attention to what I’m saying?” Voice assistants also know to document visits without over-documenting unnecessary and unimportant information (e.g. patient mentions of their recent vacation trip to the Caribbean).
Ready for the future
Healthcare leaders are faced with difficult decisions every day, such as where and how much money to allocate to the introduction of new technologies. With each version of voice AI getting better and better at extracting meaningful information from any interaction, voice remains one of the smartest levers. Investing in healthcare.
We haven’t reached the “Holy Grail” of smart voice assistants yet. can The time savings gained by doing so help organizations address real operational pain points. Healthcare organizations leveraging Best Voice today also benefit from being able to adapt to rapidly evolving solutions in the near future.
Belwadi Srikanth is Suki’s Vice President of Products and Design, overseeing and executing Suki’s aggressive product roadmap for AI-powered voice solutions in healthcare. Suki Assistant Gen 2 uses generative AI to listen to doctor-patient interactions in real time and automatically generate clinical notes without human intervention in the background. Previously, she worked at Google for more than 15 years, where she served as Director of Product Management, Search, Discovery, and Knowledge where she led the innovation of Graph. Srikanth is a Gold Medalist from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and brings his 20+ years of experience launching and scaling products around the world, both within Google and in start-ups. . For more information, please visit: https://www.suki.ai
