What would you say if you walked into an exam room and your doctor asked you if you’d mind letting the walls listen to your conversation?

The scenario seems a bit futuristic, to say the least, and for the time being it is, at least in terms of being a technology not yet widely in use.  But in a recent article at Harvard Business Review, three doctors provide a glimpse of a new suite of technologies that, taken together, constitute Ambient Clinical Intelligence, or ACI.  

And one way of summing up what ACI amounts to would be to say, “The walls have ears.”

As the doctors describe it, “ACI is less a device than a set of capabilities as unobtrusively present and available as the light and sound in the exam room. The best way to picture ACI is to think of a typical exam room with a flat-screen display on the wall showing requested information. An inconspicuous array of microphones captures the patient interaction accurately regardless of speakers’ movements or positions. A computer isn’t needed in the exam room, because the computing and data entry takes place behind the scenes in back-end and cloud-based systems.”

In other words, via an array of microphones and speech recognition technologies, the room itself is recording and processing the conversation between doctor and patient, as well as responding to an array of real-time requests.

In their words, ACI “integrates conversational AI, machine learning, speech synthesis, natural language understanding, and cloud computing to provide diagnostic guidance and clinical intelligence. That includes highlighting potentially overlooked diagnoses based on patient history and symptoms, as well as possible drug interactions and recommended alternative medications. The system responds in real-time when the doctor asks to view patient histories or test results, prescribes medications, orders tests, and schedules follow-up appointments. Once the patient visit is over, the system creates a summary for the patient, updates the patient’s record, and enters appropriate billing codes for the physician to review, edit, and submit in the electronic health record (EHR).”

One of the key benefits they cite for this developing use of AI is that, so far, doctors who have tested it have been able to save a lot of time that, currently, goes to filling out reports. 

“I would probably spend six to eight hours a week documenting,” said one doctor involved in an ACI test. “I bet that my time has been cut in half, if not by two-thirds. Spending an extra five minutes on every patient, if you’ve got 30, 35 patients, that’s a lot of time, and you can find a lot of things to do with an extra two hours every day.”

In the writers’ view, physician burnout is a big and growing problem.  But ACI may go a long way toward providing a solution.

So, if, in the not-so-distant future, you walk into an exam room and are told the walls have ears, chances are that’ll be a good thing.