AI Scribes: Can Technology Do More Than Free Doctors From Data Entry?

Since the widespread adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems in the 1990s, the health care industry has been on a relentless quest to digitally optimize the doctor-patient interaction. Today, many predict this pursuit will be dramatically changed by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into nearly all aspects of EHR systems, transforming patient care and clinical workflows in ever more revolutionary ways.AI-powered EHRs are now theoretically capable of automating administrative tasks, providing real-time clinical insights, personalizing treatment plans, and allowing health care providers to focus more on patient care and less on data entry. Implementing these capabilities into a coherent clinical practice has the potential to not just enhance efficiency. It promises to fundamentally change how medical professionals interact with patients to make clinical decisions in what is becoming, in effect, a true collaboration of doctor and computer code.

Medigy Insights

To provide broad access to sensitive video data, Johnson’s team developed tools to de-identify the videos. Even the video of the doctor and patient movements during the encounter is anonymized into stick figures that can, in association with the audio, provide useful visual information on the clinician and patient affects and interactions.Aside from freeing the doctor from input tasks and allowing for greater focus on the patient’s words and body cues, this type of system can aggregate data from thousands of doctor-patient encounters.

Continue reading at ldi.upenn.edu