Nabla, a French AI company that focuses on helping doctors and nurses transcribe notes more efficiently recently announced an expanded pilot with healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente.
The timing of the announcement raised many eyebrows as it came on top of news that 75,000 of Kaiser’s employees were walking off the job on strike.
One of the chief complaints of the union negotiators is related to understaffing and long hours that lead to staff burnout.
Nabla utilizes OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.0 large language model to underlie its tool which helps doctors with the arduous task of documenting patient visits.
Doctors can spend over 15 hours of their week documenting patient visits and often they leave this work to the very end of the day which extends their work day long beyond what is healthy.
Kaiser began testing the Nabla tool earlier this year but the speed of the announcement that the tool will be rolled out to 10,000 doctors in Northern California is what has raised questions.
On the one hand, the use of AI has many worried about the security of their jobs.
On the other hand, tools like Nabla are not seeking to replace the diagnostic work that nurses and doctors do, but simply to streamline the massive amounts of paperwork that is expected for documentation saving hours of work for staff members each week.
This does not mean that other companies aren’t working on tools to either help or replace diagnostic work that are the purview of doctors and nurses.
A recent report by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston showed that ChatGPT 4.0 did well in assessing patients.
“Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to generative AI models that are capable of detailed text-based responses that score highly in standardized medical examinations,” said Adam Rodman, MD, co-director of the Innovations in Media and Education Delivery (iMED) Initiative at BIDMC.
Kaiser is contemplating rolling the Nabla transcription Copilot much more widely in the coming year.
Leave a Reply