Cloud Hosting

In Germany alone, around 150 million doctors letters are written every year. This takes precious time, which could be used elsewhere. The doctors letter generator, currently being developed by scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS, could provide a solution for creating the document in a fraction of the time. The application is based on a combination of algorithms and artificial intelligence for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The new white paper Natural Language Processing in the Medical Sector lists the numerous additional opportunities for hospitals using NLP.

Health data is currently one of the fastest-growing data sets. How we process this data and what possibilities it offers for patients, care professionals, and doctors is an exciting question and one to which we have at least part of the answer, explains Dario Antweiler, Healthcare Analytics team leader at Fraunhofer IAIS. He has authored a white paper with his team illuminating the current developments and opportunities for document-based processes in the medical field.

Thanks to Autoscriber, doctors pay more attention to you than to their computer

The pressure on healthcare providers is getting worse. Doctors are unable to give their patients their full attention because they spend a lot of time on administrative tasks.

In the paper, the experts discuss Large Language Models (LLM), which have undergone drastic development in recent months, catapulting them into the public spotlight. The best-known example of an LLM currently is ChatGPT, a chatbot that creates natural-sounding texts. In the not-too-distant future, these models will be able to work multimodally, meaning that theyll be able to process images and tabular data as well as the texts and spoken language with which they already work, explains Antweiler. This opens up new possibilities in the medical sector, which could free up staff for other tasks and improve patient treatment processes while considering data protection at all times.

The healthcare sector faces numerous challenges, such as staff shortages, cost pressures and an information overload from the constantly increasing amounts of data. Much of the hospital data is still laboriously analyzed by hand. Evaluating, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from the data costs valuable time at various points a commodity lacking in the stressful day-to-day of hospitals. In the worst cases, key information goes missing, making treatments more difficult, leading to expensive reexaminations or incomplete accounting, Antweiler explains.

To find a solution for these problems in hospitals, the Healthcare Analytics Team at Fraunhofer IAIS is working closely with medical professionals. Together with several university hospitals, including Essen University Hospital (Universittsmedizin Essen), it is currently developing various possibilities for information extraction from documents. The next objective is to bring the doctors letter generator to the market by the end of 2024, simplifying the creation of discharge letters. To do this, the AI analyzes all existing documents and creates a natural-sounding text containing easy-to-understand patient explanations. After a check, making changes or additions if required, the doctors can send the letter at the click of a button and in a fraction of the time needed to create it themselves from scratch. Another advantage is that patients, who often have to wait for this document on the day of their discharge, can leave the hospital more quickly.

AI halves development time medical innovations; faster and more reliable methods within reach

Research to implement innovations in healthcare takes an average of seventeen years. Especially given the speed of technological developments, that is far too long.

Other functions of Clinical NLP reduce the workload of the medical staff since the AI automatically collates critical information from a patients medical records and makes it available to all clinical staff in a clear, structured format. Information is available in next-to-no time and can be thoroughly processed and made wholly accessible to medical staff. Dario Antweiler says: In most hospitals, countless texts are evaluated manually every day. This is repeated in various departments and again after discharge by the family physician or specialist. Our applications make these processes fully automated, quick and precise, and as regards data protection secure, too. Healthcare systems, and especially staff and patients, would benefit from this.

The rest is here:
When Artificial intelligence writes the doctor's letter, the doctor and ... - Innovation Origins