Everyone would like an assistant - someone to answer the phone and e-mail, schedule appointments, make coffee, feed the cat. This is especially true in healthcare, where the advent of mHealth is giving rise to the so-called virtual assistant and offering promises of improved medical documentation and better workload management.
According to a survey recently conducted by Nuance, 80 percent of physicians believe that within five years, virtual assistants "will drastically change how they interact and use electronic health records and other healthcare apps, making them more efficient and freeing up time to spend on patients."
Nuance Healthcare, a Burlington, Mass.-based developer of voice-enabled clinical understanding solutions, has a stake in this segment of the industry. The company has more than 500 clients using Nuance clinical language understanding technology, and it will be unveiling its newest virtual assistant project, named "Florence," at the 2013 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition next week in New Orleans.
"The technology exists today in Nuance to create a more intuitive way for doctors and patients to coordinate care and improve efficiency through dialogue-driven intelligent systems that hear, understand and respond," said Joe Petro, senior vice president of healthcare engineering and R&D for Nuance, in a press release.
Hence the recent survey. Pointing out that one of every three doctors spends at least 30 percent of each day on administrative tasks, Nuance officials extracted these results from their recent survey:
- 65 percent say the top role of a virtual assistant would be to enable more accurate and timely information to support care or alert physicians to missing data in records.
- 73 percent say they expect virtual assistants to improve healthcare and patient engagement by helping to coordinate care between different caregivers.
- 80 percent believe virtual assistants will help patients by engaging them in the healthcare process, pushing them to adhere to medical advice and compelling them to modify behaviors.
The survey asked physicians to list the top five ways in which voice-enabled virtual assistants would change the delivery of healthcare. Their answers:
- Navigate the electronic health record;
- Navigate diagnosis and prescription options;
- Improve access to data in the EHR;
- Improve the patient discharge process and follow-up communications; and
- Improve communications between providers.
"Mobile virtual assistants have the potential to reinvent the way we deliver patient care," said Alireza Shafaie, a physician with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, in the Nuance release. "As a consumer, I already experience the value of mobile assistants, and would love to bring that natural, intelligence-based dialogue to my work as a primary care physician. For every one patient I see I have to communicate my recommendations in three different places. A mobile advisor that could do that on my behalf in one shot would give me back more time in what truly matters - time with my patients."
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