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Show HN: Using GPT-3 and Whisper to save doctors’ time

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Show HN: Using GPT-3 and Whisper to save doctors’ time

#1
Hey HN,

We're Alex, Martin and Laurent. We previously founded Wit.ai (W14), which we sold to Facebook in 2015. Since 2019, we've been working on Nabla (https://nabla.com), an intelligent assistant for health practitioners.

When GPT-3 was released in 2020, we investigated it's usage in a medical context[0], to mixed results.

Since then we’ve kept exploring opportunities at the intersection of healthcare and AI, and noticed that doctors spend am awful lot of time on medical documentation (writing clinical notes, updating their EHR, etc.).

Today, we're releasing Nabla Copilot, a Chrome extension generating clinical notes from video consultations, to address this problem.

You can try it out, without installation nor sign up, on our demo page: https://nabla.com/copilot-demo/

Here’s how it works under the hood:

- When a doctor starts a video consultation, our Chrome extension auto-starts itself and listens to the active tab as well as the doctor’s microphone.

- We then transcribe the consultation using a fine-tuned version of Whisper. We've trained Whisper with tens of thousands of hours of medical consultation and medical terms recordings, and we have now reached an error rate which is 3× lower than Google's Speech-To-Text.

- Once we have the transcript, we feed it to a heavily trained GPT-3, which generates a clinical note.

- We finally return the clinical note to the doctor through our Chrome extension, the doctor can copy it to their EHR, and send a version to the patient.

This allows doctors to be fully focused on their consultation, and saves them a lot time.

Next, we want to make this work for in-person consultation.

We also want to extract structured data (in the FHIR standard) from the clinical note, and feed it to the doctor’s EHR so that it is automatically added to the patient's record.

Happy to further discuss technical details in comments!

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[0]: https://nabla.com/blog/gpt-3/

Re: Show HN: Using GPT-3 and Whisper to save doctors’ time

#4
I like the idea, but I would like it even more if it was on-prem. The doctors (at least in EU) will be very wary of having their client meeting essentially recorded by a third party. With this as a cloud SaaS, patient confidentiality is essentially broken since the raw data is available to you while you transcribe it. I understand that you compete with "google speech-to-text" but this is not a feature meant to be used by doctors (even if they "illegally" do).

Obviously the business model is harder with on-prem, but cloud-first for doctor notes is in the long run much harder.

Re: Show HN: Using GPT-3 and Whisper to save doctors’ time

#5
> This allows doctors to be fully focused on their consultation

Here's the thing: rigorous medical documentation is not a burden on the practitioner, but rather an integral part of treating someone. You need detailed historical data to diagnose some tricky conditions and treat them correctly.

What's the tool doing to prevent a practitioner from simply blindly copy-pasting the output without verifying it?

> and saves them a lot time.

Which means more billable. Have you considered charging per medical act performed?

Re: Show HN: Using GPT-3 and Whisper to save doctors’ time

#6
Last time I went to the doctor, he charged me $300 to google symptoms on a computer. Now you're saying I get to pay $300 for him to ask ChatGPT? No thanks. We all know that is where this is going - doctor decision support system, i.e. the AI has access to information locked behind expensive journals that the patient does not.
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