A project in the new OpenNotes Lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center aims to explore the opportunities and challenges of using artificial intelligence to generate patient visit summaries.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
The initiative, which will see OpenNotes collaborate with clinical genAI developer Abridge, will explore how AI can enable collaboration between patients and doctors while promoting transparency and advancing healthcare equity, they say.
BIDMC-based OpenNotes has long been a leader in patient access and empowerment. Working with Abridge and its AI-powered clinical documentation platform, the goal is to explore how patient-physician conversations can improve point-of-care notes and enable actionable visit summaries.
Abridge offers real-time automation with the aim of reducing the documentation burden and administrative tasks for doctors. After patient visits, the AI technology creates both a structured clinical note and a visit summary for the patient, “written at an 8th grade reading level and (providing) information such as new diagnoses, medications and next steps,” the company says.
The OpenNotes Lab at BIDMC will help evaluate Abridge’s AI-generated patient notes and help improve them to better meet patient needs. In the first phase, focus groups of patients will be given summaries of Abridge visits and asked to rate them on accuracy, usability, accessibility and other efficacy measures. No actual patient data will be used in that phase, the health care system says.
“We are excited to lead this project that brings the voices of patients directly into the design of AI tools for healthcare,” said Cait DesRoches, professor at Harvard Medical School, executive director of OpenNotes at BIDMC. “By involving patients and their care partners in the process, we aim to set new standards for the responsible and transparent use of AI in clinical documentation, and ensure that these technologies serve patients, care partners and physicians.”
THE BIG TREND
OpenNotes has transformed patient engagement and physician experiences worldwide since its launch in 2010 as a pilot collaboration between Beth Israel Deaconess, Geisinger and Seattle-based Harborview Medical Center, enabling more open and transparent communication between patients, their families and care teams is possible.
“This is a movement,” said OpenNotes co-founder Tom Delbanco, former chief of General Medicine and Primary Care at BIDMC, when we first interviewed him a decade ago.
By 2015, OpenNotes had enabled approximately five patients to have full access to their clinical notes through secure electronic portals. In the years since, as hundreds of other healthcare systems joined the patient empowerment movement, that number has grown dramatically. In 2020, that number was 50 million.
And now, of course, thanks in part to the clear benefit demonstrated by the OpenNotes initiative, the 21st Century Cures Act is now a reality. mandates that providers share clinical visit notes electronically with patients at no charge.
The project has always been driven by the belief that such free and transparent access is an important driver for safer and better quality care.
“I have always thought that the medical record is the hub of the wheel, the way to bring patients much closer to those who care for them,” Delbanco has said.
Now, with the advent of generative AI, there are new avenues to explore.
We spoke last month in Boston with Dr. Chethan Sarabu, director of clinical innovation at Cornell Health Tech Hub and AI and informatics strategist at OpenNotes.
In addition to meeting with patients, he says he’s encouraged by the ability of large language models to enable “a new level of patient empowerment” by helping healthcare consumers understand clinical notes, navigate insurance claims and more .
ON THE RECORD
“This research collaboration with OpenNotes will harness the power of actual patient conversations to inform the next generation of visit summaries, an invaluable tool for keeping physicians and patients on the same page,” said Abridge founder and CEO Dr. Shiv Rao. “We are excited to continue exploring ways to enrich the Abridge platform with insights from the research we will conduct with OpenNotes.”
“The visit summary came about with the widespread adoption of electronic health records in the early 2000s, and it’s time for innovation,” added Katie McCurdy, a patient advocate and UX designer at Pictal Health, who is a member of the OpenNotes Lab Advisory Board. “The potential impact of clearer, more user-friendly visit overviews is enormous.”
Mike Miliard is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.