Clinicians today are experiencing unprecedented levels of administrative burden and cognitive overload.
According to a recent survey, about 49% of physicians report experiencing some measure of burnout. Another report found that physicians spend 15.5 hours per week on paperwork and administration, and nine of those hours are spent on EHR documentation.
During a Becker's Healthcare webinar sponsored by Solventum, two healthcare technology experts discussed how conversational and ambient AI technologies are transforming healthcare delivery and enabling providers to focus on patient care rather than data entry and documentation:
- Dan Engel, senior product manager, ambient intelligence solutions, Solventum
- Tim Ruff, senior product manager, front-end speech solutions, Solventum
Conversational AI that captures clinical documentation, creates insights and drives action
Health systems and clinicians are under considerable pressure to improve the physician-patient relationship. Yet, accurately capturing documentation can take away from a physician's ability to focus on the patient and deliver optimal care.
"While we can't get rid of all clinical documentation time, there are ways to reduce it and make it more efficient," Mr. Engel said. "We can use technologies that don't cause further distraction but optimize and enable workflows that we know are necessary."
Solventum's conversational AI platform leverages speech recognition, real-time natural language understanding, clinical intelligence, deep learning, intent and context to capture clinical documentation, create insights and drive action.
"We structure and encode clinical narratives that are typically unstructured so that we can use them to drive downstream workflows," Mr. Engel said. "With AI-powered, proactive computer-assisted physician documentation (CAPD), we deliver insights and nudges to clinicians within the EHR workflow to close gaps in real time and apply best practices. Our goal is to drive efficiencies, reduce redundancies and make documentation accurate, complete and compliant the first time around."
By augmenting regular EHR workflows, the Solventum conversational AI platform generates higher-quality documentation with greater speed and accuracy, which reduces the need for retrospective queries and follow-up that disrupt physician workflows.
"We want to speech-enable the EHR," Mr. Ruff said. "Our solution integrates with systems directly, allowing organizations to speech-enable them for a better clinician experience. Our solutions are also supported on iOS and Android phones, as well as Mac and Windows devices."
With generative AI, clinical documentation becomes a byproduct of patient-physician conversations
To further streamline clinician workflows, Solventum offers a well-defined path to incremental innovation and automation. Conversational virtual assistants automate everyday administrative tasks and conversationally place orders in the EHR. Moving along the continuum, ambient clinical documentation automates clinical documentation, making it a byproduct of the patient-physician encounter.
"Ambient clinical documentation is an emerging space and we're seeing a lot of excitement," Mr. Engel said.", It’s a physician-assistive technology designed to turbocharge and bring additional efficiency to existing workflows. After automating note generation, we can look at driving increasingly smarter workflows such as implicitly understanding what orders need to be placed from the patient-physician conversation, whether diagnoses and medications need to be reconciled in the patient chart and if there are other visits to be scheduled."
Ambient clinical documentation, traditional speech recognition and virtual assistant technologies improve patient and physician satisfaction levels. Patients feel that their clinicians are more engaged in the conversation during appointments. Clinicians appreciate more efficient documentation workflows as well, because they have more time to focus on patient care.
Solventum delivers solutions to support clinicians and health systems through the entire documentation journey, from capturing information from patient visits to driving documentation improvement and final coding.
These technologies also support health system financial sustainability. "We are able to capture additional discrete details from office visits that might have been omitted if physicians were entering data manually," Mr. Engel said. "By gathering these extra nuggets, we see that our technology results in more complete coding and capture of details for value-based care initiatives, improving the financial well-being of the health system."
Conclusion
Solutions like the ones offered by Solventum reduce the cognitive burden on clinicians, streamlining care delivery without disrupting it. That's because the Solventum HIS portfolio includes real-time speech understanding, AI-powered computer- assisted physician documentation (CAPD), conversational virtual assistants and ambient clinical documentation. With a comprehensive capture-to-code portfolio such as Solventum’s, everyone wins —patients, clinicians and health systems.
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