The project, taking place in the up-to-date OpenNotes Medical Center lab at Beth Israel Deaconess, aims to explore the opportunities and challenges of using artificial intelligence to generate patient visit summaries.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
The initiative, in which OpenNotes will partner with Abridge, developer of clinical genAI, will explore how artificial intelligence can enable collaboration between patients and doctors while increasing transparency and promoting health equity, they say.
BIDMC-powered OpenNotes has long been a leader in patient access and empowerment. The goal of the collaboration with Abridge and its AI-powered clinical documentation platform is to explore how patient-physician conversations can improve notes at the point of care and enable more actionable visit summaries
Abridge offers real-time automation to reduce the burden of documentation and administrative tasks for physicians. Following patient visits, AI technology creates both a structured clinical note and a visit summary for the patient, written at an eighth-grade reading level and [providing] information such as up-to-date diagnoses, medications and next steps,” the company says.
The OpenNotes Lab at BIDMC will facilitate evaluate Abridge’s AI-generated patient notes and facilitate improve them to better meet patient needs. In the first phase, patient focus groups will receive Abridge visit summaries and be asked to evaluate them for accuracy, usefulness, accessibility and other performance measures. The health system says actual patient data will not be used at this stage.
“We are excited to lead this project that incorporates patient voices directly into the design of health AI tools,” said Harvard Medical School professor Cait DesRoches, executive director of OpenNotes at BIDMC. “By focusing on patients and their treatment partners, our goal is to set new standards for the responsible and transparent use of artificial intelligence in clinical documentation and ensure that these technologies serve patients, treatment partners and clinicians.”
A BIGGER TREND
OpenNotes has transformed patient engagement and the physician experience around the world since its launch in 2010 as a pilot collaboration between Beth Israel Deaconess, Geisinger and Seattle-based Harborview Medical Center, enabling more open and limpid communication between patients, their families and care teams.
“This is a movement,” said OpenNotes co-founder Tom Delbanco, former chief of the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at BIDMC, when we first interviewed him a decade ago.
In 2015, OpenNotes enabled approximately 5 patients to have full access to their clinical notes through secure electronic portals. Over the following years, as hundreds of other health systems joined the patient empowerment movement, that number grew tremendously. By 2020, the number was 50 million.
And now, of course, thanks in part to the clear benefits of the OpenNotes initiative, the 21st Century Cures Act is now in effect mandates service providers provide patients with notes from clinical visits in electronic form free of charge.
The project has always been guided by the belief that such free and limpid access is a key factor in ensuring safer, higher quality care.
“I have always believed that medical records are the heart of the circle, a way to bring patients closer to those who care for them,” Delbanco said.
Now, with the advent of generative AI, there are up-to-date possibilities to explore.
Last month, we spoke in Boston with Dr. Chethan Sarabu, Director of Clinical Innovation at the Cornell Health Tech Hub and Artificial Intelligence and Informatics Strategist at OpenNotes.
Beyond the patient experience, he said he’s encouraged by the ability of vast language models to enable “a new level of patient empowerment,” helping healthcare consumers understand clinical notes, navigate insurance claims and more.
ON RECORDING
“The research collaboration with OpenNotes will leverage the power of real-world patient conversations to inform the next generation of visit summaries, which will be an invaluable tool to keep physicians and patients informed,” said Abridge founder and CEO Dr. Shiv Rao. “We are excited to continue to explore ways to enrich the Abridge platform with insights from the research we will conduct using OpenNotes.”
“The visit review occurred with the widespread adoption of electronic health records in the early 2000s, and it has been some time since they were refreshed,” added Katie McCurdy, a patient advocate and UX designer at Pictal Health who serves on the OpenNotes Lab Advisory Board. “The potential impact of clearer and more user-friendly visit summaries is enormous.”