I appreciate the new and approved medical terminology for my daughter who is "increasingly fussy" (and has been since she…
Morning Headlines 3/22/23
Microsoft-owned Nuance will launch Dragon Ambient EXperience Express, which uses ChatGPT-4 to automatically generate clinical notes, this summer.
Maven Clinic Accelerates Growth in the United Kingdom with Acquisition of Naytal
Maven Clinic, a virtual women’s and family health provider that has raised $300 million, acquires UK competitor Naytal for an undisclosed sum.
North Carolina-based Bionic Health will use $3 million in seed funding to further develop its membership-based “AI health clinic” for preventative care.
Perspectives of Patients About Immediate Access to Test Results Through an Online Patient Portal
A survey involving four academic medical centers finds that nearly all patients appreciate having their test results posted immediately to the patient portal, even if their providers haven’t reviewed them.
Nuance-ChatGPT4
About 2 years ago, Judy Faulkner, in an online seminar with Vanderbilt had said that Epic is working on an AI powered voice assistant and that it was at least 2 years away (https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/4-updates-from-judy-faulkner-on-epic-s-software-upgrade-plans.html). It will be interesting to know if this Nuance product is the result of that partnership (and joint IP) though Microsoft/Nuance have not mentioned Epic anywhere in their media release and Judy could not have known two years ago about LLMs that have made this advance possible – so unlikely.
Regardless, seems like Epic customers will get access to this functionality because of their integration and business relationship with Microsoft/Nuance.
But if this is not joint work/IP then what a massively missed opportunity for Epic because in that scenario, to get access to DAX Express – Epic customers will pay a pretty penny to Microsoft. Otherwise, when it comes to Generative AI, their expensive EHR will just be expanding dot phrases into pre-defined macro text.
Also note that Epic President Carl Dvorak gave Nuance the original idea to develop DAX back in 2014 or so:
https://histalk2.com/2020/01/06/histalk-interviews-joe-petro-cto-nuance/
“Five or six years ago, Carl Dvorak at Epic was having a conversation with us and floated the notion of a room being able to listen. At the time, we didn’t have any necessarily tangible connection with how we were actually going to accomplish that. As conversational AI and other technologies developed, we started to get a firmer notion around what the exam room of the future could look like.”
Yes – around that time, they even had a UGM skit that dramatized that scenario! But idea (and theater) doesn’t imply that this was joint work between Epic & Microsoft (maybe it is).
Earlier this week, Microsoft included this quote from their Epic in their chatGPT-4 announcement: “Our investigation of GPT-4 has shown tremendous potential for its use in healthcare. We’ll use it to help physicians and nurses spend less time at the keyboard and to help them investigate data in more conversational, easy-to-use ways.” (translate: “we have maybe a couple of developers playing around with chatGPT API in their spare time and we will have a demo/visually stunning slides to make vague promises by UGM”).
If it isn’t [joint work], then how do you explain to a health system exec that their EHR vendor has missed the biggest boat in tech advancement in recent years?
Maybe, you don’t – after all, what options do they have? It’s not like Cerner is doing any better.
And it isn’t that Epic is a public company with an independent board where shareholders can express their disappointment (just like they did with Google recently when they started lagging behind Microsoft).
Well timed. Milking the chatGPT hype. Lets hope this is not a repeat of BARD demo/release. and least of all lets hope and pray they don’t depend on the users of the software to make it ‘smarter’. This is not an area where u can go to market with a half baked product and then use the user behavior to learn/improve.