Recording Doctor-Patient Visits Shows Great Potential

Doctors, do you know how you would feel if a patient recorded their visit with you? Would you choose to record them if you could? You may soon find out.

A new story appearing in STAT suggests that both patients and physicians are increasingly recording visits, with some doctors sharing the audio recording and encouraging patients to check it out at home.

The idea behind this practice is to help patients recall their physician’s instructions and adhere to treatment plans. According to one source, patients forget between 40% to 80% of physician instructions immediately after leaving the doctor’s office. Sharing such recordings could increase patient recall substantially.

What’s more, STAT notes, emerging AI technologies are pushing this trend further. Using speech recognition and machine learning tools, physicians can automatically transcribe recordings, then upload the transcription to their EMR.

Then, health IT professionals can analyze the texts using natural language processing to gain more knowledge about specific diseases. Such analytics are likely to be even more helpful than processes focused on physician notes, as voice recordings offer more nuance and context.

The growth of such recordings is being driven not only by patients and their doctors, but also by researchers interested in how to best leverage the content found in these recordings.

For example, a professor at Dartmouth is leading a project focused on creating an artificial intelligence-enabled system allowing for routine audio recording of conversations between doctors and patients. Paul Barr is a researcher and professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

The project, known as ORALS (Open Recording Automated Logging System), will develop and test an interoperable system to support routine recording of patient medical visits. The fundamental assumption behind this effort is that recording such content on smart phones is inappropriate, as if the patient loses their phone, their private healthcare information could be exposed.

To avoid this potential privacy breach, researchers are storing voice information on a secure central server allowing both patients and caregivers to control the information. The ORALS software offers both a recording and playback application designed for recording patient-physician visits.

Using the system, patients record visits on their phone, have them uploaded to a secure server and after that, have the recordings automatically removed from the phone. In addition, ORALS also offers a web application allowing patients to view, annotate and organize their recordings.

As I see it, this is a natural outgrowth of the trailblazing Open Notes project, which was perhaps the first organization encouraging doctors to share patient information. What makes this different is that we now have the technology to make better use of what we learn. I think this is exciting.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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