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Voice First Health

Voice First Health

Written by: Teri Fisher MD
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Voice-first technology is becoming the operating system of healthcare, and it is poised to completely disrupt the way we experience everything in health and medicine. We are entering the era of ambient computing – smart speakers around us that are ready to carry out our commands through the most natural interfaces known to us – our voices. In this podcast, we discuss the latest news, projects, research, and breakthroughs about the rapidly expanding intersection of Healthcare and VoiceFirst technologies. We cover Amazon Echo and Alexa devices, Google Assistant, Samsung Bixby, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, and other smart speakers, in addition to voice recognition, natural language understanding, artificial intelligence (AI), and everything that works (and doesn’t work) to help you better understand where our healthcare system is headed.


Dr Teri Fisher is a Sport & Exercise Physician and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is an experienced keynote speaker, educator, consultant, and podcaster, who loves sharing his excitement and passion for artificial intelligence and voice-first technology. He has a passion for e-health innovation and the intersection of voice technology and healthcare.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Copyright Voice First Health 2020 Hygiene & Healthy Living Physical Illness & Disease
Episodes
  • Saykara in the Office with Dr. Gabe Charbonneau

    Saykara in the Office with Dr. Gabe Charbonneau
    Aug 3 2020
    In this episode, Teri welcomes Dr. Gabriel Charbonneau, a family physician (Family medicine specialist) in Stevensville, MT.Dr. Charbonneau comes on to share his experience in using voice technology at his practice and specifically the voice assistant called Saykara. SayKara’s goal is to free physicians from the mountains of paperwork that await them at the end of each day. They use their own speech recognition model and AI, to tackle the issue of clinicians being in a room and having to chart their notes on a computer while they are interacting with their patient.That AI-powered healthcare virtual assistant that simplifies the documentation process is actually called Saykara or Kara. Saykara listens to the interaction between a physician/clinician and their patient, and then transcribes the audio recording into the EHR. Key Points From Dr. Charbonneau!His experience using Saykara in his medical practice.The huge role SayKara is playing in preventing physician fatigue and burn out.BackgroundHe experienced burnout right out of residency and it led him into researching whether there were tools that could help take the edge off of some of the electronic charting (EHR) they were doing, which was very slow back then.He experimented with Dragon Assistant although it was not elegant.He was competitive with his partner at the practice when it came to building tools to make EHR easier, and that included building skills. They then came up with a way to make the process of treating patients easier using Dragon and Macro Recorder.They even taught other people to use the system and also built voice commands for other physicians.When he got tired of being a travelling consultant, he started a software startup and built a prototype add-on macro tool that could be used to take multiple steps in an EHR and make them into one step. The business didn’t do very well, but he still uses the tool and there are other physicians who use it too.He finds the intersection of technology and medicine very interesting.He was introduced to Tenor, a company that builds digital medical assistants to help clinicians provide better care, be more efficient and make better decisions, and served there as a physician advisor. That's where he developed a huge interest in AI and voice AI.Tenor eventually went out business so he decided to focus more on what he could do to solve the issue of physician burnout. He started by creating a T-Shirt with the words, “Fight Burnout”, and his work was noticed by people at SayKara, which led to them working together.He helped bring a SayKara pilot project to Montana and has been working with the company ever since.Using SayKaraBefore using SayKara, his office work environment was very optimized because he already had the tools he was using. He didn’t think SayKara would make any difference for him, but when he started with the pilot project, he was amazed by just how much more it streamlined things at his practice.SayKara is a mobile iOS app he uses on his phone and it always has his patient list for the day on there.He selects the patient he wants to see before going in to see them, and then walks in and requests the patient for permission to use the AI assistant in recording their conversation. So far, no patient has objected to it.He then turns it into listening mode which enables the assistant to listen to the conversation. It captures all the audio, but one still has to give it occasional commands to get it to do things. The wake word is “Hey Kara” or “Okay Kara”The technology is evolving towards a fully autonomous solution that will listen to whole conversations and work on everything without any human editing to produce accurate transcripts.He basically uses SayKara like an Alexa in the exam room because he talks to it with voice commands and he doesn’t have to speak any punctuation because it’s very natural and intuitive.He’s very excited that he is helping make SayKara better with the feedback he provides from using the solution.He realized that previously, with Dragon, it took a lot of mental effort to proof read things, but SayKara has some editing and quality control that it does in the background to make sure whatever someone says comes out right.Quality Control SayKara has people who proofread the transcripts that the AI generates and they send the transcript over to Dr. Gabe to sign off on them.SayKara is incredibly accurate so he doesn’t have to spend much time reviewing the transcripts.Initially, SayKara’s turnaround time was not so good because it would take up to 24 hours to get a transcript, but the turnaround is now around 10 to 20 minutes.The ImpactThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected his practice (Rural primary care) since it’s operates within a fee for service business model. Therefore, diverting people away from the clinic due to the pandemic negatively affected his bottom line.He has been doing more telemedicine to cope with the changes.He recently ...
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    30 mins
  • Siri for Hand Washing with Eric Sauve of Speebly

    Siri for Hand Washing with Eric Sauve of Speebly
    Jul 7 2020

    In this episode, Teri welcomes Eric Sauvé, the Chief of Product and User Experience at Speebly.


    Eric has been a serial entrepreneur for years and has started and built numerous startups, some of which were acquired by larger companies. He developed an interest in voice technology somewhere along the journey and ended up co-founding Speebly, a voice assistant program that can be used across multiple platforms.

     

    Key Points From Eric!

    • How they are using voice technology (Siri) and the Apple Watch to help with handwashing during the current Covid-19 pandemic.

    Focusing on Siri

    • Their initial inspiration was using Siri. The fact that Siri gives users a bunch of web results when she can’t answer a question gave him the idea of creating a seamless hand-off from Siri to the different web properties.
    • That would mean that a user could continue searching using their voice.
    • They have also worked with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but their focus on Siri was informed by the fact that Siri has way more users.

    Inspiration Behind Speebly

    • Their inspiration is based on the fact that when people are doing anything, they will either want to type or use their voice, and voice is, of course, the best option especially where there is a lot of text input.
    • Siri is a closed ecosystem compared to Alexa and Google on the speaker side of things, but it has a ton of users and an app environment of third-party developers. This is why they focus more on Siri.
    • Their main aim is to make it so that anyone who has an app can take advantage of voice search to drive traffic to their app or so that there can be a seamless handoff where a user asks Siri a question and they can keep talking to the app on their phone.
    • They released a software development toolkit (SDK) that app developers can put in their iPhone or Android projects to serve as the talking interface of their app.
    • The toolkit is also available for Apple watch OS and people can use it without their phones.

    Helping With the Pandemic

    • They have been aiming at helping people understand that they could use voice in the context of smartphones and the Apple watch.
    • They’ve been working on an in-house app called Handwash Circles to encourage people to not only wash their hands but wash them long enough.
    • It’s a touch-less voice first hand wash timer. A user can say, “Hey Siri, start handwash” and the app will start a countdown timer for the appropriate amount of seconds that one is supposed to wash their hands.
    • They plan on implementing accelerometer and gyroscope features where the app can determine if someone has done a good job washing their hands.
    • The community feature of the app enables circles of people, for example, a person’s workplace to access data on their handwashing activities.
    • Studies have shown that there is an improvement in the quality of hand washing where people have devices on them to monitor their hand washing. They ensure people’s data privacy in different ways.
    • They are currently in the process of onboarding their first 10 organizations that are interested in implementing the use of the app at their workplaces.
    • People can also sign up to be beta testers.

    Links and Resources in this Episode

    • www.Speebly.com/circle
    • The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
    • Voice Technology in Healthcare Book
    • www.TheVoiceDen.com

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    28 mins
  • Voice in the Operating Room with Heather Utzig of Pragmatic Voice

    Voice in the Operating Room with Heather Utzig of Pragmatic Voice
    Jun 16 2020
    In this episode, Teri welcomes Heather Utzig, the Co-Founder and CEO at Pragmatic Voice, a tech innovation company that combines big data, analytics, tech & creativity to drive businesses.Heather has an extensive background in healthcare having worked for companies like Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly & Co with her efforts focused on the rapid growth of their sales and sales teams. She was responsible for managing over 130 field sales and sales managers in the area of Brain Health and Sleep efficacy. Her team won the most awards for sales success. She was awarded the Summit Award for outstanding leadership. She has also been a successful entrepreneur and has helped a lot of people launch businesses in catering, construction, healthcare, etc. She has owned and sold successful businesses, and worked with several technological platforms and implementation projects with companies over the past 10 years. Key Points From Heather!The voice applications they have been developing at Pragmatic Voice, specifically the ones geared towards helping surgeons keep track of instruments in the operating room and so much more.Her Introduction Into VoiceShe was developing a technology with one of her companies and she had requested voice to be developed for it because it was around medical instrumentation in general (they worked with medical instrument service providers and were looking at how to prevent infections through the touching of the instruments so voice would ensure that a lot of the processes were hands-free and mobile).In the process of having that voice application developed, she met her co-founder and learned a lot about voice from him.What They’re Doing In The Healthcare SpaceFrom her healthcare background, she has always considered how voice can be applied to solve the problems in healthcare.The fact that there is a lot of human connection in healthcare, especially when it comes to doctor-patient interactions, makes voice very crucial in ensuring that there’s more effectiveness in the delivery of healthcare.Pragmatic works with healthcare companies, facilities, and even physicians to help them place their applications into voice, and advice them on how that is related to HIPAA (privacy) and other areas. They have developed several voice applications in relation to that.One of those applications is Instrument Voice which works inside a hospital, surgery center, or doctor’s office where there is instrumentation that needs to either be repaired, maintained, sterilized, or logged.Anyone working with the instruments within a healthcare setting can look at an instrument’s history, ask questions, pull out manuals, see videos, and even request repairs through the voice app. Pragmatic is streamlining that whole process to make it easier for the healthcare providers.They also have Instrument Wiki, an application that enables doctors, hospitals, and manufacturers to collaborate on information to help each other out in working with their instruments and assets in the hospital.The applications are built on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, with their own proprietary open-source database technology.Most hospitals have had a problem in unifying their biomed and sterilization departments, and Pragmatic’s applications, because of their ease of use, can help in bringing a couple of departments in the hospitals together to work in an easier way. Their PresenceThey have been working with some hospitals in New York and they are working on refining several things with plans to go to full scale market in the next month.Links and Resources in this EpisodePragmatic Voice WebsiteInstrument VoiceThe Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula CourseVoice Technology in Healthcare Bookwww.TheVoiceDen.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    26 mins
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