Doctors, like most of the rest of the world, are not big fans of paperwork, whether “real” or digital, and one of the complaints since the introduction of EHRs has been the amount of time they have to spend at the keyboard.

With the goal of reducing that burden, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) last year established an Innovation Laboratory to test emerging AI and machine learning tools that can address what many providers see as a major impediment to patient care.

Now, the group is looking to recruit 100 doctors willing to test a potential solution.

According to a recent release, Suki, an AI-powered, voice-enabled digital assistant for doctors, uses AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to complete administrative workflows, such as creating clinically accurate notes and retrieving patient information from the EHR. Physicians speak naturally, without having to memorize rote commands, and Suki accurately understands and completes their tasks.

In a recent pilot project launched by AAFP’s Innovation Laboratory, 100 percent of physician users saw time savings and a dramatic increase in satisfaction with notes completion, efficiency and EHR use for other administrative tasks.

“Suki was chosen for the first pilot for several reasons. The company was founded with the goal of helping physicians spend more time caring for patients and less time on administrative tasks. Increasing physician job satisfaction is the ultimate goal of our Innovation Lab,” said Stephen Waldren. “The company is actively and successfully marketing to primary care and family medicine, and the solution didn’t require any new hardware for the physicians who tested it in practice.”

The organization says “pilot results were compelling with a 62 percent decrease in documentation time per patient, a 51 percent decrease in documentation time during clinic, and a 70 percent decrease in after-hours charting. Physicians described how the digital assistant allowed them to see their patients and complete their documentation without feeling rushed or having to work after hours. Several physicians described this impact as a ‘breakthrough’ in their practices.”

Launched in 2017, Suki recently announced an update to its technology called Suki Speech Service that better understands the speaker's intent when giving a command, allowing for more language flexibility and enabling doctors to speak more naturally, the way they would with a colleague and not have to remember rote commands.

"If a clinician says, 'What does my day look like?' Suki understands to pull up the clinician's schedule," Suki founder and CEO Punit Singh Soni said in an interview.

“Digital assistants like Suki show great promise as an essential technology to optimize the family medicine experience,” noted the AAFP’s Waldren. “In these initial results, physicians recovered time and focus previously lost to clerical burden. The reduction in time and urgency dramatically reduced after-hours work at home and reduced physician burnout.”