Want to save your organization’s doctors two hours a day?
We don’t want to overpromise, but that’s what Austin Regional Medical Clinic, a multispecialty medical group serving central Texas, managed to do when it asked Notable Health, a vendor of an AI-assisted Natural Language Processing (NLP) solution, for help reducing its physicians’ clerical burden.
According to a recent article in HealthcareITNews, “Notable Health’s technology leverages an Apple Watch to document physician-patient discussions and uses speech recognition, AI, machine learning and natural language processing to parse the conversation down to its relevant pieces and accurately record them directly into the patient’s electronic record.”
As Dr. Manish Naik, chief medical information officer at Austin Regional, explained the advantages gained, “the software assists with physician documentation because the physician can simply dictate their findings into the Apple Watch before, during and after a visit. Simply by stating the section that is being dictated, such as ‘HPI’ or ‘physical exam,’ the technology places the text in the correct section of the note.”
The final note is produced by a combination of artificial intelligence and human quality checks, then the physician reviews and signs the note in the EHR. The technology is also able to integrate with the group practice’s Epic EHR to reduce the manual work associated with order entry, service codes and routine visits.
The core problem, explained Naik, is that “(p)hysicians are acting as the most highly trained data entry clerks in the world to complete many of their EHR workflows. To cope with these challenges, physicians have begun to bring the EHR into the exam room with their patients, taking focus away from the patient.”
Austin Regional currently has more than 30 physicians successfully using the technology across a range of specialties, OB/GYN, general surgery, orthopedics, rheumatology and cardiology.Specialists use the technology to both capture their visit documentation and reduce the administrative burden associated with common orders and visit codes.
Yet another benefit, said Naik, is the ease with which Austin Regional was able to implement the new technology. The project went live in just two weeks, and Naik said six months after implementation, physicians have seen meaningful improvements in clinical workflows and patient engagement.
“This improved efficiency has also led to decreased symptoms of burnout from EHR documentation,” Naik remarked. “Physicians have reported that they are able to see more patients throughout the day, focus more on their patients during office visits, and still leave the office earlier to spend more time with their families.”