Speaker 1: Roughly 60% of doctors in family medicine, pediatrics, and internal medicine say they are, guess what, burned out. A big pain point, according to many, filling out medical records, where now there is an AI app for that, and I wanna talk to Bertha Coombs, who joins us with a look at how that technology is helping doctors happily, and finally, in the office. Bertha.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and not just in the office, Andrew. You know, of course, when you go to see your doctor, most of the time, chances are, you see them sitting at the computer, typing notes while you're talking to them. That's going into your electronic health record. The thing is, a lot of them don't finish up until later at home, during what doctors call pajama time. Microsoft's Nuance unit has an AI app that could put pajama time to rest.

Speaker 3: You don't look like you feel good today.

Speaker 2: Dr. T'Challa Johnson-Foy starts patient visits by pulling out her phone.

Speaker 3: It listens in on our visits so that I can pay more attention to you. Are you comfortable with me using it?

Speaker 2: Using Nuance's DAX app has freed Foy from typing when she's seeing patients. The AI program writes her patient summaries for her, which has freed her from.

Speaker 3: Pajama time, which is, should be the time where you're getting ready to wind down and go to bed. We're usually still charting and noting and doing things that are going to enhance the life of the patient, but not necessarily our own quality of life.

Speaker 2: At Baptist Health in Jacksonville, harnessing generative AI programs to help doctors and nurses fight burnout is a top priority.

Speaker 4: There's new economies of scale and economies that healthcare will be able to get into, leveraging AI because you simply, because you eliminate all the administrative redundancy and bureaucracy overhead, and you allow folks to work top of license.

Speaker 2: Using AI to reduce administrative tasks could help hospitals cut total costs by five to 11% in the next five years, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study. For physician groups, up to 8%, and for health insurers, seven to 10%, though the upfront investment isn't cheap.

Speaker 4: If it costs me X, but I just made my patients a whole lot happier and my physicians a whole lot more productive, well, there's an answer right there by itself. But about that productivity,

Speaker 2: Dr. Foy says it shouldn't mean more work. Pajama time is now reserved for time with her family.

Speaker 3: This is about the doctor having a quality of life that they deserve, because we're people too.

Speaker 2: So the newest version of that app, Dax Express, which uses the open AI technology, writes up the note instantaneously, literally. You stop talking and there's the note. Few hospital are actually testing how to use this for follow-up notes to patients. And I talked to one doctor in San Diego who says, we do put on the note that they are generated by AI, but she says my patients would know it because the notes are much nicer than mine.

Speaker 5: That's what they say about the drive-through AI, that it's like nicer than dealing with a human.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's amazing. Microsoft and Nuance are sort of in the lead on this, but they're not the only ones who are working on this. Everybody wants a piece of the action

Speaker 5: because it's healthcare. So this has huge promise for records as well, which has probably been one of the most frustrating parts. I mean, I can't tell you how many times you show up and you're filling out the, and I've said this before, I don't even fill it out correctly anymore because I don't have time. So how much of the backend really could we see this make inroads or is, you know, all the regulation and, you know, red tape, is that still standing in the way?

Speaker 2: All that stuff. There's some of it that Baptists and other hospitals are trying to also figure out how to make it easier for you to check in and do that. You know, also the insurers are looking at this as well on the earnings call. Dirk McMahon over at UnitedHealth said, while we're looking at it, how, you know, maybe people can look up whether their physician or whatever they're doing is in network. So that's potentially something that would make it much, much easier. But I want to say that Microsoft right now is in the lead. They're working with Epic, which is the nation's largest healthcare records company. And Nuance, we have a graphic I can show you, but Amazon is in there too. They've put out a new product called HealthScribe. Also Google, also with their cloud, they have put up MedPalm. And let's not forget Oracle as well, because they bought Cerner, which is the other big records company. And they're also working in that space as well. So this is a very competitive, competitive market right now.

Speaker 1: Hey, Bertha, the question I was going to ask you about just how this works is, how often does the doctor have to go back into the notes and say, actually, I need to edit this because it didn't really catch the most important component of what was actually happening, you know, during that visit with the patient or what have you?

Speaker 2: It's really iterative. And the doctors say it's getting better and better. So I actually did a mock interview, I'll tweet out the link later, with one of the doctors from Microsoft. And there was just one thing that it missed and she put it back in. One thing right now is that all the doctors, all of the clinicians who are working with these, they do go in, they look at them. And as I mentioned, at a hospital in San Diego, when they send a note to patients, they tell them that this was generated by AI, but it was signed off by a human. So the question that people have, Andrew, is, you know, at some point, are we just going to make it automatic? But at the moment, people go back, they check it over and they make sure that it's right. But for the most part, it is.

Speaker 1: And how far are we away from, you know, how often do you have to try to get a prescription? They write the prescription, they say, we'll call it into the, you know, but then they have to go to an assistant or somebody else who has to call it into the, to, you know, CVS or whatever. Someone on CVS's side has to deal with it, confirm back and forth. How far are we away from AI just doing that? Meaning the doctor says to the phone, you know, give them Z-Pak or something. And then all of a sudden it just happens.

Speaker 2: That is one of the things, that's one of the things that they're looking at, particularly when you need a refill and you have to go back in and call. It'll be in your record. And what they're hoping is that with the AI, it'll come up more quickly. And then, you know, if CVS hopefully gets the AI as well, they'll be able to do that much more automatically. But, you know, we complain about the fact that they have to call it in now. Remember when you had to go to the office and actually get a physical script. So we're gonna move- Completely,

Speaker 1: but I think we could be a year or two, if we could be a year or two away from having to have it even called in. Meaning it could literally be said from the phone, do it, and it just magically does it. And it knows where you-

Speaker 2: You still need to sign off. You still need to sign off. And particularly when you're talking about, you know, serious drugs like opioids, those have to have an extra process in them because we've all seen what happened when we didn't. So there's still gonna be people involved in there. And there's still gonna be some things that are not gonna be automatic, at least right now. But I will tell you, I talked to a doctor from Stanford and she said, this technology right now is like when we got the first iPhone and we went, whoa, this is amazing. She says this is not gonna take 15 years to go from iPhone 1 to iPhone 14. She says it is learning and growing much more quickly than what we've seen up to now.