AI Can Do Paperwork Doctors Hate

With help from AI, doctors can focus on patients.

- By Natalie Dowzicky

EVERYONE DREADS DOCTOR’S appointments. After navigating a maze of scheduling hurdles, patients find themselves waiting 26 days on average to see a physician in major cities. The whole ordeal culminates with patients twiddling their thumbs in office waiting rooms for 20 minutes (on a good day) before getting to see the doctor for 10 minutes (on a good day).

Luckily, artificial intelligence is already starting to solve some of these logistical headaches to improve both a doctor’s productivity and a patient’s experience. Companies such as Nabla and Glass Health have created products that utilize AI to help doctors give the type of care they know patients want and deserve.

The burden of medical record keeping has always fallen to physicians. When electronic health record (EHR) and electronic medical record (EMR) systems started popping up in the 1960s and 1970s they were too expensive for most practicing physicians to adopt. As the U.S. entered the digital age, abandoning handwritten medical records made sense, but the electronic record-keeping systems in place were far from perfect. That did not stop the federal government from basically forcing doctors to adopt these systems in 2009 by tying increased Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to practices who demonstrate “meaningful use” of electronic record-keeping systems.