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Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

globalnews.ca

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Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#61

Post by williamcotton »

monocultured wrote: post #30

Just the other day there were news about how many mistakes the AI-assisted journaling caused – wrong names, wrong diagnoses, typos (buksmärta -> kuksmärta which is hilarious but serious). Some of it is surely teething problems, but unless there is a robust check upon implementation it might just add another layer of inefficient new public management make-work to the system. https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/ai-journal…

Reading and doing minor edits is much less of a cognitive load than writing.

The article does not suggest that doctors should blindly trust the SOAP note created by the tool in question.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#62

Post by resource_waste »

tomfreemax wrote: post #34

I think these tools are the solution to the shortage of doctors, and will greatly improve performance by taking more parameters into account. Not sure though if a simple LLM can do that. (Shortage of doctors is a thing at least in DE and CH) Doctors study like 10 years to follow a decision tree based on patient background and symptoms. Especially in countries where education is harder to get by this can be useful, I…

The solution to the shortage of doctors is to stop letting doctors decide the supply of doctors.

Its a special interest problem. Doctors organize, bribe/lobby politicians, limit licenses, make extra money/get more power, repeat.

The excuse 'there isnt enough surgeries', is a chicken and egg problem. More doctors lower the cost, making surgery more reasonable and not necessarily a last ditch option. Not to mention, we don't stop the number of civil engineers that graduate because 'there arent enough bridges'. You just have more people observing around the table.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#63

Post by Pigalowda »

h_tbob wrote: post #7

I talked to a therapist who hated doing notes. So I proposed a solution: Use Microsoft's "seeing AI" to describe the children playing during "play therapy". Then have a camera take a picture every few minutes, and then have chatgpt come up with the story based on the pictures and transcript of the audio, transcribed with openai whisper. Business in a nutshell!

Try just doing that yourself with random pictures of you doing things in your house. See if GPT can generate a coherent note suitable for the EMR.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#64

Post by ceejayoz »

williamcotton wrote: post #61
monocultured wrote: post #30

Just the other day there were news about how many mistakes the AI-assisted journaling caused – wrong names, wrong diagnoses, typos (buksmärta -> kuksmärta which is hilarious but serious). Some of it is surely teething problems, but unless there is a robust check upon implementation it might just add another layer of inefficient new public management make-work to the system. https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/ai-journal…

Reading and doing minor edits is much less of a cognitive load than writing. The article does not suggest that doctors should blindly trust the SOAP note created by the tool in question.

> The article does not suggest that doctors should blindly trust the SOAP note created by the tool in question.

But that's what will inevitably happen at some point, when they get to the point of only rarely making big dangerous mistakes.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#65

Post by ceejayoz »

kohbo wrote: post #49
Angostura wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels to me like an autopilot problem in the making. "This thing means that you don't have to keep your eyes on the road - but please ensure you keep your eyes on the road, in case of errors"

I found it interesting that your mind went to Tesla's autopilot. My mind went to operating airplanes. Most newer small planes have some form of GPS but you're technically not supposed to use instrument navigation until your certified to do so. I haven't met a single pilot that didn't do so, though. Anyway, it creates the very problem you mentioned but just replace "road" with "outside the cockpit".

> you're technically not supposed to use instrument navigation until your certified to do so

You can use them all you like. You just can't fly in conditions where you have to use them.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#66

Post by low_common »

puttycat wrote: post #60
flakeoil wrote: post #35

How about improving the processes and reduce the amount of forms and admin work instead?

This is another version of "use public transport instead of throwing billions on futile self driving cars" -- it's the correct, rational thing to do, but it's not the American way!

It's a Canadian-developed tool used by Canadian doctors. It's popular on the internet to offer up overly-generalized platitudes like yours but do us a favor and at least read the article first.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#67

Post by htrp »

popinman322 wrote: post #38
elitan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if Region Blekinge were using something much worse and much more expensive than Whisper for their transcription. I've been transcribing A LOT of SR (Swedish Radio) shows as part of https://nyheter.sh/ , and Whisper (self-hosted) has been very accurate.

Tangent here: really? I've found base Whisper has concerning error rates for non-US English accents; I imagine the same is true for other languages with a large regional mode to the source dataset. Whisper + an LLM can recover some of the gaps by filling in contextually plausible bits, but then it's not a transcript and may contain hallucinations. There are alternatives that share Whisper internal states with an LLM…

> There are alternatives that share Whisper internal states with an LLM to improve ASR, as well as approaches that sample N-best hypotheses from Whisper and fine-tune an LLM to distill the hypotheses into a single output. Haven't looked too much into these yet given how expensive each component is to run independently.

Any recommended ones you've looked at?

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#68

Post by Pigalowda »

resource_waste wrote: post #62
tomfreemax wrote: post #34

I think these tools are the solution to the shortage of doctors, and will greatly improve performance by taking more parameters into account. Not sure though if a simple LLM can do that. (Shortage of doctors is a thing at least in DE and CH) Doctors study like 10 years to follow a decision tree based on patient background and symptoms. Especially in countries where education is harder to get by this can be useful, I…

The solution to the shortage of doctors is to stop letting doctors decide the supply of doctors. Its a special interest problem. Doctors organize, bribe/lobby politicians, limit licenses, make extra money/get more power, repeat. The excuse 'there isnt enough surgeries', is a chicken and egg problem. More doctors lower the cost, making surgery more reasonable and not necessarily a last ditch option. Not to mention, we…

Yep. That’s what we do. You hit the nail right on the head.

I saunter down to my local US senators house and bribe him, every month or so. Then our group created a fund where we bribe the president of the United States. We organized with all the other groups in the area and bribed the pope. Next we are going to find you in your house and bribe you.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#69

Post by ceejayoz »

eru wrote: post #47
viraptor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the simplest way - if you allow AI to make decisions, you're responsible. Like this https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-th... So far we're doing pretty good with that idea globally (I've not seen any case going the other way in court)

I mean how would it work, if you tried to hold the AI liable?

Liability for the company selling the AI, I'd presume.

Re: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

#70

Post by msie »

nvy wrote: post #2

The root cause of this is that the billing system (which varies by Province) by which doctors actually get paid is a fee-for-service model. That means the system incentivizes doctors to see patients by only allowing them to get paid for actually seeing the patient: Give someone a vaccine? $15. Family doctor routine checkup? $34. The system is set up to reward the kind of doctor who sees 6 patients an hour and is on t…

The situation in BC just recently changed for family doctors:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-doctor-su...

"Provincial health officials announced the changes during a Monday news event, saying physicians will be able to stop participating in the current fee-for-service system in early 2023."

"The provincial government says a full-time family doctor will be paid about $385,000 a year, up from the current $250,000, under the new three-year Physician Master Agreement reached with Doctors of B.C. last week."

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