healthcare technology

AI-powered smartphone app can reduce physician burnout, enhance patient experience

 

Virtual assistants are a fast-growing phenomenon, not only with the use of consumer products such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri, but as part of automated communications with many industries, such as airlines and banking. Market intelligence firm Research and Markets released a report earlier this year forecasting:

 

The healthcare market has lagged behind, but in September, Nuance and Epic released the first version of a conversational virtual assistant. It operates on Nuance's Dragon Medical cloud-based platform and is available through Epic Haiku, a mobile app for physicians that interfaces with the Epic EHR. The assistant is an upgrade to the app, used by physicians, which provides secure access to clinic schedules, hospital patient lists, health summaries, test results, and notes, while supporting dictation.

 

HOW VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS WILL CHANGE HEALTHCARE SHORT TERM 

According to Sean Bina, vice president of access applications for Epic, the assistant can answer questions such as:

• What are the patient's A1c test results?
• What medication is the patient taking?
• What's my schedule for today?
• Has the patient had a colonoscopy?

 

The immediate impact has the potential to reduce provider burnout, diminish difficulty locating information in the EHR, and change the physician-patient dynamic.

 

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

VUMC is taking the virtual assistant another step further and developing contextually useful summaries to provide an overview of relevant patient information for the physician to listen to before entering the exam room.

 

Among the other capabilities in development:

• Medication and test ordering. While Dragon Medical currently has these capabilities built into its system, Epic has not yet activated this feature. During testing with Vanderbilt, the mean time for ordering medications via the virtual assistant was 17 seconds, compared to 50 seconds using the mobile app without voice assistance.
   
• Decision support tools that could issue alerts, for example, if a patient has adverse reactions or allergies to medications the doctor orders.
   
• A desktop version of the virtual assistant is planned by Nuance and Epic.

 

read the entire article at https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/innovation/virtual-assistant-eases-ehr-distractions-physicians

 

A new interdisciplinary research center at MIT, funded by the National Science Foundation, aims at nothing less than unraveling the mystery of intelligence.

The new center headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will focus on bringing researchers from separate fields together to try and crack one of the biggest questions facing science today: what is intelligence, and how can we engineer it?

By tapping a broad range of expertise, including scholars who study how a baby’s mind develops and others trying to understand how the brain makes sense of social situations, the researchers hope to take a definitive step forward over the next five years toward the long-held goal of understanding intelligence and building computers capable of thinking like people.

The center’s four main research themes are also intrinsically interdisciplinary. They are the integration of intelligence, including vision, language and motor skills; circuits for intelligence, which will span research in neurobiology and electrical engineering; the development of intelligence in children; and social intelligence. Poggio will also lead the development of a theoretical platform intended to undergird the work in all four areas.

“Those four thrusts really do fit together, in the sense that they cover what we think are the biggest challenges facing us when we try to develop a computational understanding of what intelligence is all about,” says Patrick Winston, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT and research coordinator for CBMM.

For instance, he explains, in human cognition, vision, language and motor skills are inextricably linked, even though they’ve been treated as separate problems in most recent AI research. One of Winston’s favorite examples is that of image labeling: A human subject will identify an image of a man holding a glass to his lips as that of a man drinking. If the man is holding the glass a few inches further forward, it’s an instance of a different activity — toasting. But a human will also identify an image of a cat turning its head up to catch a few drops of water from a faucet as an instance of drinking. “You have to be thinking about what you see there as a story,” Winston says. “They get the same label because it’s the same story, not because it looks the same.”

Sources: 

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/center-for-brains-minds-and-machines-0909.html

http://www.boston.com/news/science/blogs/science-in-mind/2013/09/09/mit-center-receives-million-unravel-the-mysteries-human-intelligence/SKNU4umjtPy5pN7nFnYcXL/blog.html