It's recognized that EHRs are a major cause of physician burnout due to the demands on their time for dictating notes and documenting various types of patient interactions (see: Relationship Between Clerical Burden and Characteristics of the Electronic Environment With Physician Burnout and Professional Satisfaction). Solutions for this problem include hiring scribes to manage the keyboard work for a physician (see: Greater Adoption of the Scribe Model for EMR Data Input) and the deployment of AI-enabled virtual scribes (see: This AI Software Company Just Raised $20 Million To Help Prevent Physician Burnout; Why "Virtual Assistants" Won't Remove EHR Pain Points Quickly). Here's a quote from this former article:
The premise of Suki AI is simple: It’s Alexa for doctors. Similar to how people can order Amazon’s voice-enabled digital assistant to set a reminder or tell them their schedule, doctors can use Suki to take notes during patient appointments and those notes will automatically fill out electronic health records (EHRs). That’s increasingly important as doctors spend more time logging data and less face time with patients. A 2017 study from Annals of Family Medicine found that doctors spend almost two hours on tasks related to EHRs for every hour of direct patient care. Decreasing time with patients can lead to symptoms of burnout, including emotional exhaustion and depression, according to the Mayo Clinic.
I think that it's misleading for the author of the Forbes article above to refer to the Suki AI software as "Alexa for doctors." In my opinion, it's best described as an AI-assisted virtual assistant to enable dictation of clinical notes. This is confirmed by the landing page of the company web site. How many of you dictate complex narratives into your home-based Alexa device? The answer is none because the main purpose of an Alexa device is to interpret and execute verbal commands such as to play today's news or turn on the lights in your home.
I don't want to diminish the importance of the automation of physician note dictation. It's important but it needs to be combined with the ability to verbally navigate through various complex EHR menus. The basic premise here is the the user interfaces (UI) of our current EHRs are complex, requiring multiple keystrokes to be able to input information. The ultimate goal of AI connected to EHRs is to make the Cerner and Epic UI menus invisible to physicians and nurses.
I suspect that both Cerner and Epic are eager to make their systems more user friendly but they intend to accomplish this task by themselves and not delegate it to a small start-ups like Suki AI. I have previously blogged about this same topic (see: Cerner Offers AI Tool to Combat Physician EHR Burnout; Cerner Leveraging Amazon's Cloud Storage and AI for Increased EHR Functionality; EHR Vendor Cerner Turns to Amazon Web Services for AI Development). A true multi-functional virtual assistant (i.e, an EHR Alexa) does remain only as a dream for now.
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