My latest obsession is definitely ambient clinical voice. It holds so much promise for healthcare and EHR documentation, that it’s really hard for me to ignore. I truly believe that ambient clinical voice technology is going to remove much of the clinician documentation burden over time.
You may remember some of our previous coverage of this technology including Saykara, Nuance, and the work NVIDIA is doing with NLP to enable this future. What’s interesting about all of these companies is that they are technology companies that are approaching the solution from a technology standpoint. However, in the case of Saykara and Nuance, they’ve realized that the technology isn’t quite there yet and so they have to quality control the technology using people. In many ways, those people are a mix of scribe and transcriptionist that verify the work of the AI EHR documentation assistant. Plus, those people help the AI EHR assistant learn from its mistakes and hopefully improve over time.
In a recent interview I did with Fridrik Larusson, President for Product at Soundlines, I learned about their new product Speke which is focusing on essentially the same problem: clinical documentation. However, instead of leading from a technology perspective, they’re leading from the scribe perspective and layering technology on top. This makes sense when you realize SoundLines and ScribeAmerica are both sister-companies of the HealthChannels family.
I’m not exactly sure how this will fully play out, but I think that all of these companies are working towards the same goal. It’s just a question of how much human power is required to ensure that the EHR documentation quality is at a high level. Right now the answer is it takes humans. Will that be true in the future? That’s the hundred million dollar question.
To learn more about Speke and Soundlines approach to clinical documentation and ambient clinical voice technology, check out my interterview with Fridrik Larusson below. He shares what Speke is and we talk about the quality of the clinical documentation using ambient clinical voice. Larusson also shares how they approach integrating the documentation with EHRs and then we talk about where this could head beyond clinical documentation.
Learn more about Soundlines and Speke: https://www.soundlines.com/
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