Clinical documentation is an essential component of the patient-physician visit, but manual documentation is an onerous, time-consuming task. It takes a physician's focus away from the patient in front of them and is a major driver of physicians' cognitive burden and burnout.
During a September Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by Solventum (formerly 3M Health Care), two Solventum leaders — Travis Bias, DO, deputy chief medical officer, Health Information Systems, and Daniel Engel, senior product manager, ambient intelligence solutions for Health Information Systems — discussed how conversational and generative AI technologies can alleviate the burden of manual clinical documentation and support a host of downstream uses.
Here are a few highlights:
- Physicians dedicate nearly half of their time to clinical documentation. Capturing the patient story, chart review, order entry and other administrative tasks are so time consuming that clinicians are often forced to work after hours to complete them. This excessive time spent on such tasks also reduces face time spent with patients, leading to clinician and patient dissatisfaction. Further, human error can result in incomplete documentation and care gaps.
Dr. Bias summarized a common complaint by physicians regarding their clinical documentation responsibilities: "For every hour I spend seeing patients, I spend two hours in the electronic health record (EHR) documenting their care. That's not why I went to medical school — to check boxes, to satisfy drop-down menus or type long narratives."
- Solventum's conversational AI platform automatically creates clinical notes from patient-physician conversations. To do this, the technology leverages ambient intelligence, speech understanding, generative AI, natural language understanding, clinical intelligence and deep learning. Once this blend of technologies automatically generates a note with contextual awareness of the patient record, the clinician can review the note in the EHR, edit it as appropriate and sign off.
In addition to automatically drafting clinical notes, Solventum's technology integrates into all major EHR systems — across desktop, mobile and web-based interfaces. Solventum solutions also leverage real time, in-workflow nudges to clinicians that deliver proactive clinical insights to drive right action at the right time, thereby reducing rework.
"By being very deliberate and very targeted, this technology helps clinicians get documentation right the first time," Engel said. He noted that the superior accuracy and completeness of the resulting documentation adds value to downstream use cases, such as by generating coding recommendations, substantiating reimbursement claims and driving care quality evaluation and improvement initiatives.
- To drive trust and adoption, the Solventum technology "shows its work" to clinicians. A common concern that can slow clinician adoption of advanced technologies like generative AI is that this technology can be prone to hallucinations and may produce unreliable output.
To overcome such concerns, Solventum's technology is not a "black box" — which is another criticism frequently aimed at inscrutable AI-powered algorithms. Committed to the responsible deployment of AI, Solventum’s technology clearly maps the evidence it has used in the drafting of its clinical notes and makes it available for clinician review.
"A big part of gaining trust is [showing] what evidence led to a particular segment of the note being created," Engel said. Solventum puts the highest priority on eliminating hallucination.
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