Our Executive Vice President of Speke, Vadim Khazan, sat down for an interview with Co-Founder and Chief Editor of Healthcare IT Today, John Lynn. The two talked about the future of AI, how scribes work alongside providers, and the power of ScribeAmerica’s ambient AI scribe solution, Speke. Read the interview below:
Question: Today we’re talking about ambient clinical voice, which everyone knows is my passion. I’m so excited to hear ScribeAmerica’s approach to it. Tell us a little bit about yourself and ScribeAmerica.
Answer: I’ve been with Scribe America for about six years now. We’re the largest scribe company in the world, covering everything from in-person scribing to AI with Speke. I’m a software engineer by trade and, before ScribeAmerica, I co-founded SoundLines, which ScribeAmerica acquired in 2018. I’ve been running the Speke product technology program since then.
Q: Talk to us more about the Speke solution and how it’s evolved.
A: When it comes to product development we believe the best technology lives in the background so that you don’t even realize you’re using it. It just does what you need, without modifying your workflow. That’s how we designed Speke.
It’s available on iOS devices as an application. Initially, we developed it as a standalone hardware device, so that’s one of the many ways we’ve pivoted over the past six or so years. But the provider opens the application, they find the patient that they’re visiting, they walk into the room, put it down, have a conversation with the patient as though a scribe were in the room with them
We take that audio, turn it into a clinical note, and put it into their electronic health record system.
Q: So talk to us about how Speke compares to other ambient clinical solutions. There are a lot of them. It’s a crowded space.
A: When it comes to AI-only products, the doctor has to correct the output of the AI. And this is true across the board, there’ve been staggering advances in natural language processing in the past year, which I’m sure everyone is aware of, but it’s still not quite good enough to create the sort of notes that meet the quality bar for clinical documentation. But those solutions exist for providers who don’t mind spending 10 minutes on every note correcting what the AI puts out.
We’ve developed a hybrid solution. We use AI in the background to create a rough draft of the note and then we have our trained scribe team edit the note and ensure it adheres to the provider’s preferences.
This is one of the things that we’re very good at, having human touchpoints at every interval of the process. If the provider is not happy with the documentation, if they want it slightly different, or if they want to use specific templates or phrasing, we can modify all of that. We train our scribes to create the documentation exactly how the provider wants it.
I think that’s our biggest advantage. ScribeAmerica has the largest pool of scribes in the world, and we make sure that there’s a human at every step of the process, including customer support.
Q: Talk to us about humans – that’s obviously an important differentiator for you. You are using technology to enable human scribes, that’s the AI that’s involved, and then the scribe goes through the note and reviews it and verifies it all. Is that the main approach as far as technology? Do you think you’ll ever replace the humans?
A: It is hard to predict long-term because things are moving so quickly. I very strongly believe that the best language learning models in a couple of years are going to be open source, and everyone is going to have access to that technology.
Interested in the future of AI scribe solutions? Learn more about Speke. Want to hear more from our Executive Vice President of Speke, Vadim Khazan? You can watch the full interview here.
