AI technology that revolutionised doctors' office

A new tool that uses GPT artificial intelligence allows doctors to create electronic health records while focusing more on their patients than their notes.

The tool from medical chain Carbon Health Technologies Inc., released Monday, creates a medical chart by fusing audio recordings of patient appointments with other data, Bloomberg reported.

The new tool, which is based on OpenAI Inc.'s GPT-4, also generates codes for diagnostics and billing in addition to patient care instructions.

The sheer power of GPT has revolutionised the AI industry, and the chatbot ChatGPT has raised ethical issues due to its human-like dialogue and occasionally inaccurate responses.

The use of AI in medicine has increased efficiency across the board, from drug research to patient diagnosis, the report suggested.

“These new developments in AI have really all of a sudden gotten to a very exciting place,” said Carbon Health Chief Executive Officer Eren Bali. 

Part of Carbon Health’s mission is to use technology to improve care and increase a patient’s face-time with a provider. “We are rethinking everything we built and saying, 'In a world where we have very powerful language models, how would we do these things differently?'” he said.

Carbon Health's new tool records and transcribes patient appointments using Amazon Transcribe Medical, a HIPAA-eligible service designed to accurately capture the names of medications, procedures, and diseases, combining it with other information to create a more detailed record.

Nearly 90% of transcripts are accepted by the provider without edits, and the records are more detailed than manual ones, the company said.

Clinics can see more patients without straining their schedules by using this tool, as it takes less than four minutes to create a medical record, the report explained. 

"As doctors, you get trained to do one thing, which is take care of patients and save lives, and then you find your day is filled with these administrative tasks," said Carbon Health’s Chief Clinical Innovation Officer Caesar Djavaherian, who also still works in the clinic.

"There’s already a shortage of doctors in the country, and frankly, this type of technology will make doctors more likely to stay in their jobs and actually be able to see more patients,” he said.

Furthermore, Carbon Health, used by the company’s more than 130 clinics across 12 states, uses an electronic health records platform to automate more processes, such as placing prescription and lab orders, scheduling follow-up appointments, and making referrals.

“The first iteration of electronic health records was for billing purposes, or as a substitute for paper,” Djavaherian said. “Now, you’ve got this incredible technology that can do so much more. It can enhance care.”