Livi, a smart assistant for patients, is being developed at the UCHealth CARE Innovation Center in Denver. Photography by Paul Brokering.
As of December, more than 1,550 Allina providers and therapists were using NLP technologies, which saved about $250,000 in transcription costs that month alone.
Simple yet effective commands expedite workflows even more by executing common functions. “I can say, ‘Go to the most recent labs,’ and the computer will navigate there for me,” Ingham says. “I can say, ‘Order a basic metabolic panel,’ and it’ll tee that up.”
Adoption of NLP Can Require Some Adjustments
Despite their relative ease of use, voice-powered tools may require a pivot.
Concord Hospital uses a variety of virtual desktop infrastructure workstations, so implementation varied by location. “We really strove to get the nurses to do their work as similarly as possible so that we weren’t trying to come up with different workarounds,” Eastman says.
At Allina Health, a cloud-based NLP service runs inside the Citrix platform without needing extensive configurations, and it didn’t have to integrate with the Epic EHR solution — a major plus, Ingham says. Because users can access voice-driven functions inside Epic’s mobile apps, the experience is seamless.
The biggest challenges for UCHealth were organizing Livi’s back-end data and managing users’ expectations (retrieval of patient portal usernames and passwords is a common request that is currently under review).
“You can research it, you can look and see how people are using other chatbots,” Caputo says, “but the best way to do it is to make sure you have your data set up, put it out there, see how people are asking questions and then pivot from there.”
Voice-Powered Tools Help in Breaking Down Barriers
Measurable gains are important when assessing speech-driven tools, but providers say some of the most important value is personal.
“If we are spending our time typing, it’s less time to see patients, less time to be thinking about a case and working out problems,” Ingham says. “Collectively, that all is a factor when it comes to burnout.”