GPT AI checks in at the doctor's office

A new tool uses GPT artificial intelligence to create medical records, allowing doctors to focus on their patients instead of their notes.

Clinic chain Carbon Health Technologies' product, launched Monday, combines audio recordings of patient appointments and other information to generate a medical chart. The new tool, based on OpenAI GPT-4, also creates instructions for patient care and codes for diagnoses and billing. 

The sheer power of GPT has been transformative for the AI field, with chatbot ChatGPT raising ethical questions because of its human-like communication and sometimes incorrect answers. In medicine, interest in AI has boomed as a way to increase efficiency from drug discovery to patient diagnosis.

"These new developments in AI really all of a sudden got to a very exciting place," said Carbon Health CEO Eren Bali. Part of Carbon Health's mission is to use technology to improve care and increase a patient's face-time with a provider. "We are rethinking everything we built and saying, 'In a world where we have very powerful language models, how we would do these things differently?'"

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With a patient's consent, Carbon Health's new tool records and transcribes patient appointments using Amazon Transcribe Medical, a HIPAA-eligible service designed to accurately capture the names of medications, procedures and diseases. The transcript is then combined with other information, like lab results and notes from the doctor, to generate a summary of the patient's visit. Health-care providers then can edit and finalize the record. Nearly 90% of transcripts are accepted by the provider without edits and the records are more detailed than manual ones, the company said.

The tool takes less than four minutes to create a medical record, shaving more than 10 minutes off the time it can take a doctor to manually create a chart, according to the company. That could allow clinics to see more patients without adding strain to the already stacked schedules of physicians.

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As doctors, "you get trained to do one thing, which is take care of patients, save lives, and then you find your day is filled with these administrative tasks," said Carbon Health's chief clinical innovation officer Caesar Djavaherian, who also still works in the clinic. "There's already a shortage of doctors in the country and frankly, this type of technology will make doctors more likely to stay in their jobs and actually be able to see more patients," he said. 

The charting tool is built directly into Carbon Health's own electronic health records platform, which is used by the company's more than 130 clinics across 12 states. The company is also working to license access to practices outside of the Carbon Health network.

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Carbon Health is now looking to automate even more processes, like placing prescription and lab orders, scheduling follow-up appointments and making referrals.

"The first iteration of electronic health records was for billing purposes, or as a substitute for paper," Djavaherian said. "Now, you've got this incredible technology that can do so much more. It can enhance care."