Giving to doctors
Become a doctor
Current ambient AI assistants, which hit the mainstream in 2023, are already capable of recording, structuring and summarizing patient encounters in real time. This frees clinicians from the time-consuming exercise of writing notes, allowing them to fully engage with their patients. “For complex patients, it can take me up to 45 minutes to complete documentation. Nabla makes this work infinitely better and allows me to give each patient my full, undivided attention. At the end of that visit, I click, and Nabla is forever a conceptually designed and a conceptually created for her.” Signing the last record.
“For complex patients, it can take me up to 45 minutes to complete the documentation. Nabla makes this task infinitely better and allows me to give each patient my full, undivided attention. At the end of the visit, I click away, and Nabla produces a thoughtfully designed, comprehensive record of what happened.”
Dr. Ed Lee, Chief Medical Officer, Nabula
Such uninterrupted patient engagement can lead to better eye contact and higher quality communication. For example, clinicians change their thought processes to more verbal when alternative noting occurs during patient assessment. “We originally thought patients would be nervous about hearing an AI device, but they’re actually very excited,” says Alexandre Lebron, Nabala’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “They get their physician’s full attention during the visit, and they love it when they hear the technical language when they realize they’re getting better care.”
According to Lebron, Nabala’s system can further assist physicians by pre-charting, reviewing and organizing a patient’s information in their EHR before an appointment, and coding medical data for use in areas such as billing. Nabula has also enhanced its platform with built-in dictation capability, bringing clinicians closer to a unified experience. These types of AI assistant tasks can help streamline and enhance clinical workflow and help reduce institutional administrative costs.
The promise of
Agentic AI
Agentic AI, which companies like Nabala are currently working to integrate into their systems, promises to take the success of existing AI assistants a step further. Lebron envisions a future in which physicians interact with an agent platform that connects to all the tools they already use and facilitates multidisciplinary interactions, such as reading patient data, working within the EHR, and adapting workflows in real time.
“Instead of forcing doctors and nurses to click through a dozen separate systems, our platform will provide specialized, customizable, and composable agents that turn disjointed tools into a single, continuous workflow,” Lebron says.
“Imagine a cardiologist getting ready for his morning clinic. After a few voice commands to direct the system, one agent pulls up-to-date vitals, lab results, and imaging reports from the EHR, another generates a clear patient summary, and a third flags a missed follow-up echocardiogram. Even before the patient walks into the room.”
“Instead of forcing doctors and nurses to click through a dozen separate systems, our platform will deliver specialized, customizable and composable AI agents that will transform disjointed tools into a single, consistent workflow.”
Alexander Lebron, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Nablah
Lee says the near-term scope of agentic AI includes standardized and protocolized nonclinical tasks, but he sees promise in areas such as treatment options and other types of clinical decision support, where AI can work safely with clinicians always “in the loop.”
To get to that point, Lee says, education is essential. “The beauty of medicine is that it’s a lifelong learning process. It’s not just learning about the science behind drugs, diagnosis and treatment. It’s about using new tools that will ultimately improve your patient care,” he explained.
“We need to start with the basics of AI, making sure everyone understands what it is and how it works. How it’s programmed but not overdone, what it can do, what it can’t do, the risks and pitfalls, and then really understand where it fits best into patient care,” Lee says.
He added that leadership must look ahead strategically and ensure that the entire organization is moving forward with its use and understanding of AI. “Part of that journey involves getting frontline users to be part of the process, co-designing whenever possible and conducting pilots of new solutions so the organization can learn,” Lee says. Additionally, “a culture of inclusion, authenticity, and transparency needs to be in place so you can be in the best position to succeed with transformational efforts like incorporating and integrating agentic AI into the ecosystem.”
“Part of that journey involves getting frontline users to be part of the process, co-designing whenever possible and conducting pilots of new solutions so the organization can learn.”
Dr. Ed Lee, Chief Medical Officer, Nabula
Securely integrated
In Workflows
Applying AI to high-stakes fields like healthcare requires a careful balance between productivity on the one hand and accuracy on the other. “Confidence is everything in medicine,” says LeBron. “Earning that trust means trusting physicians through accuracy, transparency and respect for their expertise.” Nabala uses a technique similar to the adversarial training model to check outputs, and it defaults to a conservative response. “We optimize precision. If we have the slightest doubt, we prefer to eliminate something from the output by default,” LeBron says.
“Trust is everything in medicine. Earning that trust means trusting physicians through accuracy, transparency and respect for their expertise.”
Alexander Lebron, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Nablah
New tools should also integrate with existing workflows and platforms to avoid adding more complexity for clinicians. “Any product can look great, but if it doesn’t fit well into your existing workflows, it’s almost useless,” says Lebron.
In areas such as customer service, creating a new interface or platform is straightforward, but this approach is not feasible or desirable in healthcare. “It’s a complex network of dependencies with a lot of workflows and processes,” Lebron says. “Everyone would like to get rid of those things, but it’s not possible because you’d need to change everything at once.” Lebron explains that agentic AI approaches offer great promise to fields like healthcare because they can “improve processes without getting rid of legacy infrastructure.”
By simplifying complex systems, automating routine tasks, and keeping up with time-consuming administrative tasks, agentic AI holds great promise in further enhancing the AI ​​assistant environment. Ultimately, the potential of this technology is not to make medical decisions or replace physicians, but to help healthcare workers devote more of their time and attention to their primary priority: their patient. “AI should focus on supporting decisions and automating everything downstream,” Lebron says. “The first role of AI is to bring clinicians back to the state where they make clinical decisions.”
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