There used to be a lot of jokes about the terrible nature of doctors' handwriting, until much of the process of seeing a physician was digitized, improving things no end for both doctors and patients. But consulting a medical expert still involves a whole lot of note-taking, and that's an increasing burden for many healthcare workers, from physicians to clerical staff. A new report says things are changing yet again, however, and a new generation of digital tools is improving the way health care workers make notes. The new innovations are powered by AI, and even if your business has nothing to do with practicing medicine, there are lessons here for your company.
The study, led by a research group from the Yale School of Medicine, cited previous reports that showed over half of a clinician's typical workday gets consumed dealing with electronic health records, leaving just a quarter of the day for direct time with patients. Documentation time has been trending upwards too, which has been linked to burnout, depleted efforts at work and more staff thinking of quitting, industry news site MedicalXPress reports.
But when medical professionals used what's described as an ambient AI scribe platform -- a system that unobtrusively takes part in a patient consultation, capturing the audio of the conversation and then transcribing it via specialized AI models into notes for the clinician to review later -- things were very different.
Between the nearly 200 participants in the investigation, most of them attending physicians, the proportion of doctors reporting feelings that qualified as burnout fell from nearly 52 percent at the start to just under 39 percent after 30 days.
That's a dramatic downward shift. The study measured how the AI tool, which the researchers pointedly did not identify, was helping, and showed it was lowering the cognitive burden of the physicians, easing up the amount of time eaten up by working on documentation, decreasing the effort the professionals felt they had to deliver at work, and lowering their mental demands. The time needed per week in "after hours" moments to complete documentation also fell by nearly one hour, reducing pressure still further. Overall the report suggests this leads to doctors having more energy to give the proper attention to patients' concerns, and frees them up for more urgent care access.
This is, of course, just one single use case for AI tools. And it's easy to see how having a reliable automatic note-taking system could dramatically change the working day of a typical frontline health care worker. Freeing up time needed to write things down would easily translate into more face-time with patients, and as long as the overall pressure on a typical physician to achieve a certain workload doesn't go up because of this extra time, then the risk of burnout would be reduced.
How does this impact your company, though?
It's a giant thumbs-up for the benefits of AI technology. In this case, as the Yale report says, it's specialized tools "that can produce professional appearing text," which are "taught to listen, instantaneously transcribe, assimilate, and assemble a document, with fine-tuning by human training."
The study shows that in the right setting, using exactly the right tools, AI can achieve some of the big promises that AI evangelists make. Instead of threatening to take over people's jobs, AI proponents argue that it can take on mundane tasks on behalf of a worker, thus freeing up staff to do more frontline, more productive tasks. The Yale report, for example, says AI scribes allowed doctors "more time for meaningful work and professional well-being."
This means that for your office, tools other than an AI scribe may prove useful and could genuinely reduce workloads and burnout risks for your staff. Choosing AI tools in a careful, considered way is important, however, and upskilling and training staff on the correct use of the technology is likely a key for this process to work properly. Many reports say organizations are failing to do this when they roll out AI systems.
