Ont. startup helps clinics save hundreds of hours on admin tasks using AI automation

A northern Ontario-based startup is helping doctors cut down on their administrative burden with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Earlier this month, the founders of WaiveTheWait presented their automated task manager at OntarioMD’s Digital Health Conference 2024 in Toronto. Their tool is capable of automatically doing a wide variety of simple administrative functions, including booking follow-up appointments, sending reminders to patients and updating them about prescription renewals.“Our hypothesis was that clinics, and staff specifically, spend a lot of time with very redundant administrative work that can be helped to be automated, allowing them to focus on the more complex aspects of healthcare,” co-founder and CEO Shreyansh Anand said during his talk on boosting workflow efficiency.WaiveTheWait first incorporated in December 2020 and its first product offering was a digital waiting room to reduce crowding in healthcare settings at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—hence the company name. In 2022, the company introduced its automated task manager, which has since been implemented in clinics in four provinces across Canada.Family physician Dr. Shane Teper, who is the chair of Queen’s Square Family Heath Team in Brampton, Ont., implemented WaiveTheWait’s task automation tools. Since Jan. 1, WaiveTheWait has done 6,000 tasks for Queen’s Square, saving them an estimated 611 hours of work. Dr. Teper says task automation has even saved his clinic money on staffing costs, as it’s allowed them phase out three staff positions through attrition. “We've freed up significant amount of time for our staff to be working on other value-added activities,” Dr. Teper, who is also WaiveTheWait’s chief medical officer, said during the talk. “Our clinic manager feels that we've helped resolve one of our primary stressors, which is our HR issues. We have a more engaged staff with more value-added work for themselves as well.”Before WaiveTheWait, Anand says staff at Queen’s Square were overwhelmed with tasks, with the average task requiring 2.5 communications. For some patients who are harder to reach, staff might need to send up to 17 communications to complete a task.“We started looking at, how do we automate some of those routine administrative work that is just letting patients know simple information, and navigating simple parts of the healthcare system,” said Anand.In addition to task automation, WaiveTheWait also offers an AI-powered document triaging service that can automatically apply labels, classify documents and add them to a patent’s chart.Anand says the accuracy rates of this service ranges between 90%-to-99% but says accuracy can vary given that the AI learning models are trained on a clinic-to-clinic basis. “I will train the AI, and then I will give 20 documents a day from the clinic's current systems and ask them to review how the AI did. If the AI did well enough, then after about 10 batches of these, we'll implement the system,” he told the Medical Post at the conference.Near the end of their talk, Dr. Teper showed the audience a photo of Queen Square staff members, smiling and out for a hike at Brampton’s Heart Lake Park, as a testament to how automation has allowed them to enjoy more leisure time.“We're out there hanging out in beautiful Brampton Heart Lake, and instead of going through faxes. And so that is our goal going forward,” Dr. Teper quipped.

Ont. startup helps clinics save hundreds of hours on admin tasks using AI automation

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics