Q&A
San Francisco-based Augmedix has progressed from a Google Glass-based clinical documentation startup to a publicly-traded, AI-enabled ...
...ambient automation platform that documents patient encounters and generates medical notes that can be transferred to an EHR.
The company, founded in 2012, also provides pre- and post-visit documentation offerings to give providers a more complete digital picture of a patient’s health journey.
I started the company about 10 years ago with the mission to rehumanize the provider/patient interaction. Originally, we were only operating on Google Glass.
Ian Shakil
What we did is we put technology at the point of care when providers and patients are having conversations. And in the background, we produce EHR notes better and faster than what the provider would do on their own.
When you think about how EHRs were done previously, there were medical transcriptionists who would help put the documentation together and providers would often dictate.
MHN
Is the ability to have EHR done in a more automated fashion easing provider burnout? Shakil: Actually, I think it’s getting worse.
Originally, doctors would do their dictation in their Dictaphone, or these unusual devices, and it would go literally ...
...to a human transcriptionist. What’s different about our solution and others as well, we are voice solutions.
We call them MDSs, or medical documentation specialists. And to heck with that, I’ll just write my own note. So you can think of it sort of as having Uber and then gravitating towards a driverless-car solution.
And a material number of providers, we hope next year will actually be able to adopt it with really good workflows that match our models.
So, I do think, over time, we’re going to see some adoption, but it’s going to take years for widespread use of our pure AI solution.