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Oracle announces general availability of AI documentation assistant for doctors
Oracle on Monday expanded access to its artificial intelligence-powered tool called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant, which aims to save doctors time by automating some of their documentation.
Administrative tasks like paperwork are often burdensome for health-care workers, as nearly 65% of doctors feel like they are a major cause of burnout, according to a February survey from Athenahealth. Physicians spend an average of 15 hours per week outside their normal hours keeping up with the workload, the survey said.
For instance, Dr. Ryan McFarland, a family medicine doctor at Hudson Physicians in Wisconsin, sees an average of 25 patients per day. He has to draft a clinical note after each appointment to record what took place and what to follow up on, which he said amounts to “several hours” of documentation each day.
“That’s just the documentation, that’s not responding to lab results, patient questions, messages,” he told CNBC in an interview. “It can get very cumbersome trying to get your note and documentation done on top of actually doing patient care.”
Oracle said its Clinical Digital Assistant can help alleviate this administrative burden. Doctors can access the tool through an app on their phone, and they hit a button to record their visits with patients. Once they stop recording, Oracle’s AI automatically generates a clinical note based on the appointment so the doctors no longer need to write it themselves.
Only the health-care organizations’ approved representatives will be able to access the recordings, Oracle said.
The assistant works alongside Oracle’s electronic health record, so doctors can also verbally ask it to pull up information about a patient’s medical history, like their latest blood test results, the company said. In other words, doctors can spend less time searching through records to find the relevant information they need.
Oracle has been testing the tool with 13 health-care organizations, including Hudson Physicians. Oracle said its assistant has saved clinicians an average of four and a half minutes per patient, as well as 20% to 40% of their daily documentation time. The tool is generally available in ambulatory clinics, or clinics that are not attached to hospitals, as of Monday.
“This will be kind of a practice requirement in our business going forward,” McFarland said. “The accuracy of the notes is much better, you catch things you might forget to document. It is a time saver, significantly.”
McFarland said he’s worked with other dictation tools in the past, but the software often caused errors and struggled with fast speech. He has also worked with human scribes that are more accurate, though he said they can be time consuming to train and difficult to keep employed. Oracle’s assistant performs like an equivalent to a human writer, McFarland said.
“I think from a note generating standpoint it’s 90% to 100% where it needs to be,” he said.
McFarland said he thinks the tool does well with complex medical terminology and can even capture abbreviations. He said he thinks there’s room for improvement with some of the specialty-specific care, as well as how the assistant can help with other functionalities like placing orders for imaging and sending out referrals and return-to-clinic reminders.
Some providers at Hudson Physicians are more particular about the style of their notes than others, so McFarland said some doctors still spend time editing. Even so, the clinic has seen a 100% adoption rate for Oracle’s assistant, which McFarland said he’s never seen happen before.
“It’s been a game changer for us, and we’ll keep using it,” he said.
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