The only way to achieve clinical AI adoption is to design products that serve doctors in a natural and personal way, said a startup CEO.
This was proposed by Tom Kelly, CEO of AI Scribe Company Heidi Health, in an interview last week at the Reuters Digital Health conference in Nashville.
The AI field is developing rapidly, which in many ways makes the clinical AI space an unknown area for providers. Kelly notes that health systems often choose the wrong AI tools, and many end up switching suppliers within a few years.
When a new type of AI tool emerged, health systems initially tended to choose “first generation” technology products, which Kelly said are often based on integration’s ease of use rather than availability or clinical relevance.
“A good example is population health products. Epic has one, and there are many different vendors. In 5-10 years, the company that broke out was Innovaccer. This was actually one of the companies that emerged later and spent more time figuring out the right use cases and incentives.”
Kelly believes that health systems need to focus on usability and the possibility of clinician adoption when purchasing AI tools in competitors’ affluent category. This is especially true for AI scribes, he noted.
Kelly claims that AI scribes need to adopt a doctor-first approach. He said users will give up tools that feel universal or embarrassing, so clinician adoption is a real challenge and should be a priority.
“What you have to do is replace what the doctors do in their minds – the job of writing down notes they want to type or indicate. You have to go in the doctor’s mind and think like they do – all these small, hidden preferences are what they write. I’m a surgeon who is trained by the surgeon, so I used to write 3/12 instead of three months,” Kelly said.
He said the Heidi team is obsessed with making the user experience feel local and natural to each user, thus retaining the clinician’s unique voice.
Kelly notes that people often “dilute the document so that it feels all the same”. But in his opinion, clinical notes are a symbol of the way clinical medicine is.
“Brutalism, the excellent surgeon wrote punitive information intensively and didn’t write it down. When I read that person, I felt what kind of doctor that person was. Think about it,” Kelly said.
He added that over time, it will become increasingly important for healthcare AI developers to keep an eye on these types of nuances.
Kelly predicts that over the next five years or so, providers may use AI to conduct conversations with patients about managing their chronic conditions, especially in value-based contracts. These types of conversations have a higher degree of tone and styling subtlety than clinical notes.
“Every doctor has a higher preference, personality, and intuition, and cannot be replaced with a single AI that the organization prescribes. You can try it – but you will only get 10-20% adoption,” Kelly explained.
For Kelly, adoption rate is king. He believes Heidi’s focus on clinician adoption can help it stand out among other suppliers, such as Abridge, Suki and Ambience, especially because of other aspects such as integration, data structures and revenue cycle coding.
Kelly announced that adoption metrics should be important not only about statistics on integration and deployment speed.
Kelly notes that AI, a provider of clinical documents, usually has a high total meeting number. He recalled the speech he saw at the HIMSS conference in March, where one of the executives told listeners that their company generated notes for 500,000 meetings on 600 websites a week.
“What I do is a little math and figure it out is that for providers, it may be less than weekly classes.
Heidi provides a free tier that allows individual clinicians to test the tool themselves.
Kelly said the model led to organic adoption directly adopted by clinicians, sometimes outperforming paid graffiti tools that the health system has officially implemented.
He said Heidi once earned enough clinicians in an organization to earn their paid clients telling leaders that they are enjoying the tool. Currently, about half of Heidi’s customers are U.S. providers, while the rest are located in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
Some of Heidi’s clients include Cedars-Sinai, NYC Health + Hospitals, Indiana Health Group and Hawse Health.
Photo: Megaflopp, Getty Images
