The new technologies are taking healthcare by storm, but the margin for success as an AI scribe service is slim.
Clinicians are harsh critics when it comes to AI technology.
Speaking at the Australian Healthcare Week conference yesterday, Tom Kelly, CEO and co-founder of AI scribe service for doctors Heidi Health, said the margin for success as a tech producer in healthcare was slim.
“If doctors have to edit their notes more than about 5%, they never use the tool ever again,” he said.
“It’s completely visceral.”
The only way to work out if a product will fly is by getting it in the hands of doctors, he said.
“The really tricky thing about building a product in this space is that the differences between the products are invisible to everyone except doctors.”
Mr Kelly said that due to the technical nature of the output, only doctors were able to effectively recognise the accuracy.
He said the reason for the success AI scribes were that they took on a task that doctors were really opposed to.
According to Mr Kelly, one in five GPs in the UK were using Heidi every day.
“The UK is one of the slowest adopting technology markets, it’s extremely difficult,” he said.
“The NHS is centralised and complicated to sell into.”
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Mr Kelly said that the pace of uptake was broader among GPs than in hospitals.
“That level of adoption is unheard of, there aren’t many tools that doctors use that often. Maybe a stethoscope but not much else.
“I think the reason that we’ve seen so much adoption is fairly straightforward.
“The burden to provide really good health care for a patient is always growing, because we’re getting better and better at figuring out how to micromanage different conditions, how to diagnose different variations and do genetic testing and find things earlier than we used to.”
The number of care hours per patient is therefore increasing, said Mr Kelly.
“You combine that with longer living populations and clinicians being burnt-out in general, it’s not that surprising to see that people are looking for solutions,” he said.
“I think in the future, AI will obviously be ubiquitous.
“It will be in every product, tool, service that we use.
“I’m very excited to see which solutions or approaches win. There’s lots of different opinions.
“I think so far from our experience, there’s definitely a lot of room to make a better product.”
