Wearables aren’t just for tracking steps anymore, as a new tool is helping doctors transcribe right from their smartwatch. This morning, voice-powered healthcare company Notable unveiled its latest technology, a voice-powered artificial intelligence wearable for doctors.
“The current physician workflow is rife with administrative burdens and complexity. With growing documentation requirements, studies have shown that physicians spend more than half of their day in EHRs and a third of their day with patients,” Pranay Kapadia, Notable CEO, said in an email to MobiHealthNews. “With Notable, physicians free up their day to offer better patient care. During appointments, they can be better listeners and more effective educators by maintaining eye contact with patients. Since Notable is passively capturing and charting for them in the background, there’s no need to type or take notes during patient time. Between appointments, their charting workflow is dramatically simplified and sped up. After a brief dictation, they just need to review programmatically generated notes, codes, and orders — then can move on to the next patient.”
The platform will combine AI and voice recognition technology to capture information from a doctor’s visit. It can pick up on dictations and orders, and can recommend the appropriate billing codes. Then the data from the visit is automatically entered into the EHR using a secure robotic processing automation.
Notable’s aim is to help cut down on paperwork. The company reported that in beta, the tool had a 98.5 percent approval rating for data entered into an EHR without edits. It also reports saving doctors at least an hour of work a day.
The technology is supposed to help patients gain access to more data as well. Patients can go back into the system and get access to the recording from their doctor’s appointments.
The platform can work with any EHR and uses HIPAA-compliant AI and automation to adapt to a physician's workflow.
The San Mateo, California-based company was founded in May 2017 and is backed by big name investors including Greylock Partners, Maverick, and 8VC. Kapadia and his team said they were inspired to start the company after seeing family members deal with excessive paperwork.
“After watching our families tackle the inefficiencies in different ways (physicians claiming to be 'click-monkeys,' hospital administrators talking about the exorbitant time spent on gathering data, and lawyers talking about how long and drawn out malpractice cases can be (even when the physician is not at fault)), we left our last company, Blend, to start Notable,” Kapadia wrote. “Being engineers and designers, we spent months understanding the workflows, incentives, and structure of the system. Having sat through and timed over 2,000 encounters, we’ve been working hard for the last year to design and build a profoundly different solution that the industry has never seen.”
AI voice-powered assistants for physicians have been around for a while. Just last week former Google and Salesforce employees announced $20 million in funding for their new digital assistant Suki. The technology captures data from patient visits and then puts them into an action plan based around doctor’s past preferences.
