DENVER — Denver Health is partnering with artificial intelligence (AI) company Nabla to help physicians focus more on patient care and less on paperwork.
According to Nabla CEO Alex Lebrun, for every hour spent with patients, doctors typically spend two hours writing notes and insurance information.
“Nobody has trained 15 years of medicine to do that. They hate to do that,” said Lebrun. “We started Nabla five years ago when we realized that physicians were spending more time doing paperwork than caring for patients.”
Dr. Daniel Kortsch is the associate chief medical information officer at Denver Health. He’s also the associate chief of AI and digital health for the hospital. He played a big role in identifying a need to partner with an AI company, and he helped choose Nabla from a list of competitors.
Doctors and other medical professionals can now begin patient interactions by starting the Nabla program on their phones. It records the conversation, transcribes it, and organizes it into a format that doctors are familiar with.
Later, the audio recording and the full transcription are deleted to protect patient confidentiality. Only the summary and organized notes are retained.
“What we want them to do is to be able to spend the time they need with a patient and then move away from those administrative tasks and move into the things that they care about, which is just giving the best care that they can to their patient,” said Kortsch. “That doesn't mean they're working at night, in the middle of the night. We don't want them to do that. We really want them to be able to walk away from their work and do the work at work and then walk away.”
Medical professionals have seen an increase in “pajama time” in recent years. That is, they are taking more work home with them.
Most doctors spend significant time at home, sometimes in pajamas, writing notes about the patient interactions they had earlier that day. Kortsch believes Nabla is a way to reduce doctor workload.
“It had features that allowed our providers simply to spend more time talking with their patients and less time typing, which is really the goal of this,” said Kortsch. “Our providers love being with patients. They got into this profession because they want to talk with patients and help patients. So taking them away from typing and into patient care has really been exciting.”
Denver Health patients can opt out of using the AI software if they wish, but Kortsch said most patients see the benefit.
“They had better eye contact. They had a better emotional availability because they weren't typing,” said Kortsch. “That's what's so exciting about it. Our patients benefited from it. Our providers benefited from it.”
For Lebrun, it’s been fun to work on technology that has direct, positive impacts. Nabla’s niche in the market has actually made it easier to recruit top AI engineers.
“It's my fourth startup but the first time I have had such a direct impact, and we get dozens of positive feedback every day from physicians,” said Lebrun. “It makes it much easier for us to have a very good team, very motivated, very loyal, compared to selling ads or doing AI to create engagement on social media. It’s a great thing.”
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