Investment in artificial intelligence medical note-taking apps has doubled in 2024 as Big Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon and startups vie to grab a share of the $26 billion AI healthcare market.
AI startups focused on creating digital “writers” for healthcare professionals raised $800 million in 2024, in comparison with $390 million in 2023, in keeping with data from PitchBook.
Startups similar to Nabla, Heidi, Corti and Tortus raised money last yr, with backers including Khosla Ventures, Entrepreneur First and French tech billionaire Xavier Niel.
The increase in funding comes as groups rush to bring AI-powered products to market that may enable doctors to create medical notes more quickly and improve interactions with patients, as health becomes a key growth area in AI -Boom will.
Microsoft, which owns AI speech recognition company Nuance, in addition to Amazon and Oracle, have launched so-called AI Copilots for physicians, which use large language models and speech recognition to routinely create transcripts of patient visits, highlight medically relevant details, and create clinical summaries.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more transformative than this in 15 years in healthcare,” said Harpreet Sood, a family doctor in south London who has been testing French start-up Nabla’s app for 15 months.
Sood, a former adviser to NHS England's chief executive on technology and innovation, said that in a full-day clinic with around 40 patients, traditional note-taking can take no less than two hours of writing time.
“It was notable that 3 to 4 minutes were easily saved from each (10-minute) consultation and it really helped in capturing the consultation and its content,” he added.
Nabla's note-taking app uses Whisper, a transcription tool from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and has been used to transcribe roughly 7 million medical visits since October last yr.
Hospitals and GPs across the UK's National Health Service are testing AI note-taking to save lots of time and improve doctor-patient interaction. According to a Mayo Clinic study, doctors spend a median of one-third of their workday on administrative tasks similar to paperwork.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that Nuance's DAX Copilot tool, launched just over a yr ago, now documents greater than 1.3 million doctor-patient encounters every month at over 500 US healthcare corporations.
Nuance, which Microsoft bought for nearly $20 billion in 2022, said the AI ​​tool reduces the time doctors spend on clinical documentation by 50 percent.
At Stanford Medical School in 2024, greater than 50 primary care physicians tested Nuance's AI-powered note taking, with two-thirds of users saying it saved time.
The AI-generated notes were closely reviewed by doctors for accuracy, and the overwhelming majority, about 90 percent, needed to be manually edited to correct inaccuracies, an individual aware of the study said.
Nevertheless, the outcomes have led Stanford to plan to roll out DAX Copilot to all of its providers.
Sood said that while he reviews every report that the Nabla app generates, the cognitive load of concurrently writing and listening during a consultation is hugely “minimized, if not eliminated,” by the tool.
“You can concentrate more on the patient, listen, be more present and understand their body language. “I enjoyed my consultations more now,” he added.
However, the rise in medical note-taking has drawn criticism from researchers concerning the dangers of AI-generated inventions, so-called “hallucinations,” which may very well be particularly harmful in a medical context, in addition to the difficulty of privacy of patient data.
Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Virginia analyzed Thousands of Whisper-generated transcript snippets from 2023 and located that about 1 percent of the audio transcriptions “contained entire hallucinated phrases or sentences that didn’t exist in any form within the underlying audio file.”
About 40 percent of the hallucinations contained harmful, fabricated content, similar to perpetuating violence or making up inaccurate associations, the study said.
“I wouldn’t just depend on the tool, I might read each note, review it and return to the transcript,” Sood said. “There remains to be rather a lot to do, but…” . . It was a giant change for me personally.”
