Healthcare turns to AI for medical notebooks

Investments in artificial intelligence medical note-taking apps will double by 2024 as big tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon and startups race to capture a share of the $26 billion AI healthcare market.

AI startup focused on creating digital “scribes” for healthcare professionals It will raise $800mn in 2024, up from $390mn in 2023, according to data from Pitchbook.

Startups like Nabla, Heidi, Korti and Tortus have raised funds in the past year. Supporters Khosla Ventures, including Entrepreneur First and French tech billionaire Xavier Niel.

The funding surge comes as teams rush to get started. AI-powered products As health is a key growth area in the AI ​​boom, it is making it faster for doctors to take medical notes and improve patient relationships.

AI speech recognition company Microsoft Nuance, as well as Amazon and Oracle, have launched so-called AI assistant pilots for doctors that use large-scale language models and speech recognition to automatically generate patient visit transcripts, highlight and create medically relevant details. Clinical summaries.

“I don’t think I’ve seen more change in 15 years of healthcare,” says Harpreet Soud, a primary care physician in south London who has been testing French startup Nabla’s app for the past 15 months. .

Sud, who was a technology and innovation adviser to the chief executive of NHS England, said traditional note-taking in a full-day clinic with about 40 patients could take at least two hours of typing.

“It helps me to easily save 3-4 minutes every (10 minute) consultation and to understand the consultation and what it is about,” he adds.

Nabla’s note-taking app uses Whisper, an OpenAI transcription tool from the maker of ChatGPT, and was used to transcribe nearly 7 million medical visits as of October last year.

Hospitals and general practitioners in the UK’s National Health Service are trialling AI note-taking to save time and improve doctor-patient relationships. According to a Mayo Clinic study, doctors spend an average of one-third of their workday on administrative tasks, such as paperwork.

Meanwhile, Microsoft says Nuance’s DAX Copilot tool, which launched a year ago, is now registering more than 1.3 million physician-patient visits with 500-plus U.S. healthcare groups each month.

In the year Nuance, which Microsoft will buy for nearly $20 billion in 2022, says its AI tool will cut the time doctors spend on clinical documentation by 50 percent.

At Stanford Medical School, more than 50 primary care physicians tested Nuance’s AI-powered note-taker in 2024, and two-thirds of users said it saved time.

The AI-generated notes were rigorously scrutinized by physicians for accuracy, and most had to be manually corrected to correct approximately 90 percent of the errors, a person familiar with the trial said.

However, the results prompted Stanford to plan to roll out a package from DAX Copilot to all of its suppliers.

As Sod examines each report the Nabla app generates, he says the cognitive load of writing and listening during a consultation can be greatly reduced, if not completely eliminated, by the tool.

“You can focus more on the patient, listen, be more present, understand their body language. I enjoy my advice more now,” he added.

However, the increase in the acceptance of medical notes has provoked criticism among researchers of artificial intelligence, known as “illusion”, because it can be harmful, especially in the medical context.

Researchers at Cornell University and the University of Virginia analyzed They found that thousands of whisper-generated transcripts of 2023 and approximately 1 percent of audio recordings contained “whole phrases or sentences that are not present in any form in the underlying audio.”

40 percent of nightmares include harmful content, such as perpetuating violence or negative associations, the study found.

“I don’t just rely on the instrument, I read every note and go back to the transcript,” Soud said. “There is work to be done there, but . . . It’s been a big change for me personally.”