Can you imagine visiting your physician while he or she communicates with a scribe thousands of miles away? Google and Augmedix believe that is the future of medicine, according to The Washington Post.
Augmedix, a San Francisco-based Google Glass startup, uses the pair of glasses and its own medical scribes to enhance the patient-provider relationship.
Approximately 500 physicians in 27 states pay between $1,500 and $4,000 per month to wear Google Glass throughout the day. Attached to the pair of glasses is a small camera, through which a medical scribe can watch an entire appointment and transcribe the patient's information. If the physician has a patient-related question, the scribe can check the patient's information and send the physician an answer, which will pop up in the right-hand corner of the glasses.
The glasses provide numerous benefits to physicians, including saving them time and allowing them to interact more with their patients. "I can look my patients in the eye again," said Teresa Nauenberg, MD, a physician at the Palo Alto (Calif.) Medical Foundation who's been using Google Glass for two years.
But it's impossible to ignore the potential problems Google Glass can create. Medical scribing in itself is a challenging job that requires acute accuracy. To mitigate problems, Augmedix's 200 scribes — who reside in either San Francisco or Bangalore, India — go through three months of training before they begin their positions.
In addition, the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks and ransomware attacks poses an issue. "You're taking something that was in the doctor's office and now you're streaming it across the world," said Avi Rubin, PhD, director of the Health and Medical Security Lab at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University. "The whole healthcare industry has lax security, and if you combine that with how private the information is and how it needs to be immediately available, that's where I have concerns."
But Augmedix, which doesn't share any data with Google, is taking precautions. Videos do not pass through hospital servers and are sent directly to scribes. Although Augmedix wants to find ways of keeping and protecting videos, as of now, each video is deleted at the conclusion of the visit.