As Healthcare IT Today approaches our 20 year anniversary from that first article we published in December 2005, I’ve been looking at some of the older articles from our 18,000+ articles on the site. I would link to the very first article we published for all of you to see the start, but it’s too embarrassing. The shift in EMR (it wasn’t even EHR back then) to where we’re at with health IT is dramatic to think about.
I’ll reminisce more in December when we celebrate 20 years of sharing great healthcare IT content (and a few not so great), but in this article I want to highlight an article I wrote back on March 18, 2006 titled “Great EMR Idea – Synchronized Video?” You’ll notice the question mark at the end of the title which means I wasn’t certain it was a great idea. Possibly because I wasn’t sure it was possible. For those too lazy (or too smart) to read that old article, the idea was basically to put video cameras in the exam room and then when you walk out of the exam room the note was done.
I further fleshed out this idea on May 12, 2016 in an article titled “The Perfect EHR Workflow – Video EHR.” By this point I could really see how NLP was going to be able to do the charting for the doctor from the doctor’s voice. What’s amazing about both articles is that we could see the need for the AI medical scribe solution to remove the documentation burden from doctors all the way back then. However, it took until ~2024 for the AI medical scribe to really solve the problem.
It really is amazing to now see what’s happened with AI Medical Scribes. It’s the most exciting thing we’ve had in health IT since the $36 billion in stimulus money. The biggest thing I missed in my prediction was that I was wrong about video. I still think video would be fascinating, but looking back at it now I can see that video is unecessary to truly solve the problem of automating documentation. The voice is enough to solve the majority of the challenge. At least until AI medical scribes add computer vision.
I still like the idea of a No Click Visit too, but that will take a while still because AI medical scribes are copilot. No clicks means that the doctor isn’t copilot. From a liability stand point, every AI medical scribe wants the doctor to take the liability and that click assumes liability.
What’s also amazing about the AI medical scribe space is that it’s evolved beyond just documentation so quickly. Most of them started doing the ambient clinical voice documentation in the EHR. However, we’re seeing them quickly evolve to so much more. I know I definitely didn’t see how the AI scribe having access to all of the documentation was going to open the door to change so many aspects of the healthcare encounter. RCM is the obvious one that I think every scribe company is working on. It makes sense that they want to draw an even clearer ROI for healthcare organizations. RCM is one of the cleanest ROIs if you can impact it in a good way.
The next question is how deep will these AI assistants go when it comes to serving the clinicians? How deeply will they integrate with the EHR vendors? Will the EHR vendors allow them to become that deeply integrated? What other physician AI agents will come to fruition? My guess is that we’ll have agents doing things we’d never have thought about because we didn’t think it was possible. I hear a lot of doctors hoping that’s true with prior auth. Is there any doctor that wouldn’t be happy to offload the prior auth burden to an AI agent? I don’t think so as wonderful as it can be listening to that insurance company hold music.
Where do you see the AI medical scribe going? What’s the future look like for these companies? Let us know your thoughts on social media.
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