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Physicians spend less time than ever with patients — just 27 percent of the workday, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2016.
The main culprit: electronic health records. Doctors find themselves increasingly glued to computers, acting as glorified data entry administrators.
Even when they’re in the same room as patients, doctors interacted with them only 52 percent of the time. However, the study also found a contra-indicator: doctors who used some kind of document support — a medical scribe or dictation service — spent more time interacting directly with patients.
That’s a dynamic LexiconAI hopes to capitalize on using GPU-infused AI.
“We thought this was a problem that we could tackle,” said Matt Rubashkin, co-founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley-based startup. “There really needs to be a better way to attack the system. How do we empower doctors and help them focus on what’s important?”
Rubashkin and LexiconAI co-founder and CTO Ian Plosker both had worked in the digital health area previously, and saw firsthand how much time was being wasted on documentation.
The two joined forces with the intent of leveraging voice and speech recognition to reinvent how medical data is captured. They focused on using deep learning to let providers capture medical information more seamlessly, without interrupting their patient interactions. The result: LexiconMD, a mobile app that takes in unstructured speech and spits out structured data.
The app records the conversation between doctor and patient and streams the audio to LexiconAI’s cloud-based engine, which returns the captured text —complete with best word suggestions — in just 500 milliseconds.
The app integrates with many electronic health record systems to make it possible to automatically fill the right fields with the returned data, and Rubashkin claims that LexiconMD is 94 percent accurate out of the box. (For systems with which LexiconMD isn’t yet integrated, physicians can still use the speech recognition capabilities and simply plug the data that’s returned to them into the correct fields manually.)
“When people interact with LexiconMD, it’s like interacting with a human,” said Rubashkin. “Instead of you having to use specific words and adapt to it, our goal is for LexiconMD to adapt and learn from you.”
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Sunday March 04 2018, @10:22PM (7 children)
Whether or not they achieve this awakening you call for, a disparity remains between the amount and expense of training and education required by a doctor vs. a data entry clerk. If you are using the one to do the work of the other, that's arguably very poor value.
Solutions in the past have included having Doctors dictate patient notes, which takes less time and allows them to spend more time with patients, the notes being transcribed later by people who went to school for two years instead of fourteen, working for 150%-250% of minimum wage instead of 999% and up.
However, some smart+unfeeling bean counters discovered that, if you vastly reduce the amount of attentive time Doctors spend with patients, you can fire the data entry person and only pay one of those salaries, having its recipient do the job of both, poorly, instead of his own job, well.
This inarguably is a cost savings measure in that at the bottom of the sheet, fewer dollars are paid out in salaries, and fewer dollars are spent on dictation systems. It's just a stupid one that causes you to get a lot less of everything for your dollar that you're paying Doctors with.
My health care provider, the United States Veterans' Administration, believes strongly in having its Doctors perform their own data entry. I am not impressed with the result.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @10:44PM (3 children)
Docs have an infamous reputation for nasty hand writing, and even without that, all the medical jargon requires specialized education, even for data entry clerks.
Docs need to realize what they are trying to achieve, as a profession, rather than getting drenched in their entitled sentiment.
I am not a doctor, but I say this as someone who have a couple physicians in my family - I see the both sides of the issue.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 04 2018, @11:10PM (2 children)
Translation: I haven't spend 15 years studying and training in medicine, but my ignorance is as good as their experience. And I'm telling ya, doctors better learn this and learn it quick:
Or else... beware the wrath of AC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @11:31PM (1 child)
I spent so much time and money so I deserve this.
Fuck you and your daughters.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @11:40PM
Especially the daughters.
Wait what are we talking about and who am I?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Sunday March 04 2018, @10:47PM (1 child)
That's hardly fair. I'm sure Finance is doing a great job identifying cost savings, and extending that perspective, they should be able to find even more.
For example, what's this "Microsoft Excel" thing on our last budget report? Pfft -- you can do just fine with a paper ledger, and notepad.exe if you want to get fancy.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday March 05 2018, @06:26AM
Huh? You need a custom EMR with outcomes reporting, patient tracking results tabulation, and more.
And you need trainers, BAs, PMs and a consulting firm to help installation, and confrim adoption.
that will be $2,000,000 per site.
Efficiency!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday March 05 2018, @03:49AM
Unless you have the data entry clerk doing the doctor's job. Even if the DEC is only helpful 20% of the time, to the MBAs in charge it looks like a good tradeoff.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.