Healthcare provider to use AI to cut paperwork

Guernsey's specialist medical care provider is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help doctors spend more time with patients and less on paperwork.

The smart AI assistant, known as Heidi, helps doctors by taking notes during patient visits and automatically creating documents, such as referral letters and patient summaries, which the doctor checks and signs off.

The chief executive of the Medical Specialist Group (MSG), Dr Farid Fouladinejad, said this will save doctors significant time.

Heidi was piloted in June by 10 MSG consultants and their admin colleagues and is now set to be gradually rolled out for all outpatient consultations.

"Right now, doctors spend around 40% of their time writing and checking notes, letters, and reports. While this work is important, it takes them away from seeing patients," said Dr Fouladinejad.

"There's a lot of excitement about AI in medicine, but we must be careful and sensible in how we use it.

"One of the first ways MSG is using AI is to help our doctors in writing up and summarising their notes and letters.

"This could help them see more patients and reduce waiting times."

Dr Michelle Le Cheminant said the technology will hopefully give the best experience to MSG's patients.

"When you've thought about any change within medicine, for example, you take the dictaphone, the typewriter, we need to move forwards and this is part of that journey," she said.

Dr Le Cheminant says patients will not even notice the technology being used because Heidi works in the background "via a web browser on our computer or via an app on the doctor's phone."

"The main difference that patients will notice when they are in the clinic room is that we won't be having to produce a lot of handwritten notes, we won't be having to type a lot on the computer, so really the difference is that focus on the patient and that interaction."

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