Investments in AI note-taking medical applications to double in 2024 as Big Tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon and start-ups race to grab a slice of the $26 billion AI healthcare market.
Artificial intelligence startups focused on creating digital “scribes” for health professionals raised $800 million in 2024, compared to $390 million in 2023, according to data from PitchBook.
Start-ups such as Nabla, Heidi, Corti and Tortus raised money last year, with backers including Khosla Ventures, Entrepreneur First and French tech billionaire Xavier Niel.
The funding boost comes as groups rush to launch AI-powered products aimed at making it faster for doctors to retrieve medical notes and improve interactions with patients, as health becomes a key area of growth in the AI boom.
Microsoft, which owns AI speech recognition company Nuance, as well as Amazon and Oracle have launched so-called AI co-pilots for doctors that use large language models and speech recognition to automatically generate visit transcripts of patients, to highlight important medical details and create clinical summaries.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more transformative in 15 years of healthcare than this,” said Harpreet Sood, a primary care doctor in South London who has been testing the French app startup Nabla for the past 15 months. .
Sood, a former technology and innovation adviser to the chief executive of NHS England, said that in a full-day clinic with around 40 patients, taking traditional notes could take at least two hours of typing time.
“It’s been impressive, easily saving 3-4 minutes of each (10-minute) consultation and really helping to capture the consultation and what it’s about,” he added.
Nabla’s note-taking app uses Whisper, a transcription tool from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and has been used to transcribe about 7 million medical visits since October last year.
Hospitals and GPs across the UK’s National Health Service are trialling AI note-taking as a way to save time and improve doctor-patient interactions. According to a Mayo Clinic study, doctors spend an average of one-third of their workday on admin, such as paperwork.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said Nuance’s DAX Copilot tool, launched just over a year ago, is now documenting more than 1.3 million doctor-patient encounters each month in over 500 US healthcare groups.
Nuance, which Microsoft bought for nearly $20 billion in 2022, has said the AI tool cuts the amount of time doctors spend on clinical documentation by 50 percent.
At Stanford Medical School, more than 50 primary care physicians tested Nuance’s AI-powered note keeper in 2024, with two-thirds of users saying it saved time.
The AI-generated notes were closely scrutinized by doctors for accuracy, and the vast majority, roughly 90 percent, had to be manually edited to correct inaccuracies, a person familiar with the trial said.
Despite this, the results have prompted Stanford to plan a rollout of DAX Copilot to all of its providers.
Sood said that while he controls every report Nabla’s app creates, the cognitive load of writing and listening simultaneously during a consultation is greatly “minimized, if not completely removed” by the tool.
“You can focus more on the patient, listen, be more present, understand his body language. I have enjoyed my consultations more now,” he added.
However, the rise of medical record keeping has prompted criticism from researchers about the dangers of AI-generated fabrications, known as “hallucinations,” which can be particularly harmful in a medical context, as well as the issue of data privacy. of the patient.
Researchers at Cornell University and the University of Virginia analyzed thousands of fragments of transcripts generated by Whisper from 2023 and found that approximately 1 percent of the audio transcripts contained “hallucinatory phrases or sentences that did not exist in any form in the underlying audio.”
About 40 percent of the hallucinations involved harmful content created, such as perpetuating violence or creating inaccurate associations, the study said.
“I wouldn’t just rely on the tool, I would read every note to check and go back to the transcript,” Sood said. “There is work to be done there, but . . . for me personally, it’s been a big difference.”
