Your medical notes delegated to generative AI

What if software took advantage of the latest advances in artificial intelligence to automatically write your medical notes, summarizing what was said during the consultation, noting down your observations and leaving superfluous conversations aside? This is the ambitious promise of Microsoft’s Nuance division, with its new DAX Express service. In a teleconsultation simulation organized at the end of April for the media, a doctor discussed with a fake patient his health problems. He talked about his symptoms and answered the doctor’s questions, who told him which tests would have to be carried out. At the end of the meeting, the doctor ended the recording and in a few seconds, a medical note appeared on his screen, summarizing the consultation: “Angelo Cabot is a 42-year-old male who came in today because he feels tired and has lost weight. The patient mentioned that he has been working a lot recently. He claims to feel more tired for two months, and that he is more stressed than usual. He explained that he lost around 10 kilos during these two months, which is rather unusual for him,” the document said, which followed the classic form of a medical note. Read: ChatGPT & MedPaLM: Useful AI for doctors arrives The software used during this demonstration was DAX Express from Nuance, which is most known in the health sector for its voice transcription software. According to the company, this solution automates the writing of medical records using artificial intelligence. The advantages of such a tool are numerous. “It frees up the clinician during his meeting, and allows him to look his patient in the eye," said Jonathan Dreyer, vice-president responsible for marketing solutions at Nuance. The doctor also recovers valuable time because writing of medical notes can take several hours a week. A study published in 2021 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association also indicated that this workload, sometimes carried out after office hours, was closely linked to burnout. How it works Not surprisingly, the technology behind DAX Express is Open AI’s GPT-4 language model, at the heart of the ChatGPT chatbot that has been making headlines for several months. DAX Express also uses the other artificial intelligence tools developed by Nuance over the years which ensures the transcription of voice recordings matches for a medical context. “The model has been trained on millions of medical consultations,” noted Dreyer. Thanks to its various services, Nuance had access both to the recordings of meetings (by videoconference and in person), but also to the medical notes produced by the doctors afterwards, which allowed it to create a specialized version of GPT-4. With enough examples, the generative AI model was able to “learn” how each type of doctor makes their medical notes, what goes in and what gets left out (thousands of doctors and their patients discuss the weather during their meetings but that doesn’t go into the medical notes, for example). Physicians who will be using DAX Express, whether in teleconsultations or face-to-face meetings, will simply need to start the app on their phone or computer before the consultation and press a big red button at the end to get a first draft of their medical note. Watch out for mistakes Tools like ChatGPT are notorious for making mistakes (“hallucinations” in the jargon), and DAX Express could make them too. The software could for example mistranscribe information or misinterpret it. It might also miss important details. “Once the consultation is complete, then you need to review the (note) and make sure it’s fair and complete,” says Doug Kaufman, core solutions consultant at Nuance. Several doctors who used the tool during its development tended to verbalize their thoughts and intentions a little more than usual during their consultations, to be sure that the software capture them. “It’s a benefit that was not expected, but that patients appreciate, according to the surveys that we have carried out,"” notes Dreyer. Unfortunately, those eager to automate their medical note writing will have to be patient. DAX Express is offered by invitation in the United States at this time. A Canadian launch date has yet to be announced. This item originally appeared in our Quebec sister media brand Profession Santé and has been translated from French.

Your medical notes delegated to generative AI

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics