When it comes to EHRs, one common lament from providers is that it can be difficult to find and access relevant information in a timely fashion.

But Vanderbilt University Medical Center is taking steps to fix that, unveiling recently a neew voice assistant for electronic health records that can give verbal summaries back to providers using natural language processing.

According to reports, “with VEVA, the Vanderbilt EHR Voice Assistant, the health system is using NLP artificial intelligence from Nuance to help interpret voice requests, and HL7's SMART on FHIR standard to pull pertinent data and provide relevant summaries.”

As Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal, core design advisor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, explained concerning the challenges in accessing information, "It is a time-consuming and tactually complicated effort to understand the patient story. Often you know what piece of information you want but are forced to forage through a graphical user interface designed by someone that does not understand your clinical workflow. This can be an exasperating experience and one of the reasons EHRs often are cited as contributors to physician burnout.”

Put another way, she noted, the EHR also has become an intrusive third-party in the exam room, often forcing providers to break away from interacting with their patients in order to find critical information.

“The fascinating aspect of this work is that we have finally arrived at a place where the technology behind our natural language processing has parity with human understanding," said Kumah-Crystal. "We now have confidence that computers can understand the words we say. We now have commonplace models of these interactions in the consumer realm like Siri and the Amazon echo that can understand people’s verbal requests and respond almost humanly.”

Although she has not seen many other organizations besides Vanderbilt, Epic and eClinicalWorks venturing into the EHR voice assistant arena, she expects this concept soon will catch on, and that there will be more exciting developments in the field.

"We need people developing varieties of skills and interactions for these new voice user interfaces to demonstrate the various use-cases and help identify the gaps so we can continue to innovate," she said.