Investments in AI medical note-taking applications are set to double in 2024, as major tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon and startups race to grab a share of the $26 billion healthcare AI market.
AI startups focused on creating digital “scribes” for healthcare professionals will raise $800 million in 2024, compared to $390 million in 2023, according to PitchBook.
Startups such as Nabla, Heidi, Corti and Tortus raised money last year, with supporters including Khosla Ventures, Entrepreneur First and French tech billionaire Xavier Niel.
The funding surge comes as groups rush to launch Products powered by artificial intelligence which aims to speed up medical note-taking for doctors and improve interactions with patients, as health becomes a key growth area in the AI boom.
Microsoft, which owns AI speech recognition company Nuance, as well as Amazon and Oracle, have launched so-called AI copilots for doctors that use large-scale language models and speech recognition to automatically generate transcripts of patient visits, highlight medically relevant details and create clinical summaries.
“I don’t think in 15 years of healthcare I’ve seen anything more transformative than this,” said Harpreet Sood, a primary care doctor in south London, who has been trialling the app from French start-up 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 of around 40 patients, traditional note-taking can take at least two hours of typing.
“It was amazing, we easily saved 3-4 minutes from each one [10-minute] consultation and it really helps capture the consultation and what it’s all about,” he added.
Nablina’s note-taking app uses Whisper, a transcription tool from ChatGPT OpenAI, and has been used to transcribe around 7 million medical visits since last October.
Hospitals and GPs across the UK NHS 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 administrative tasks, such as paperwork.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said Nuance’s DAX Copilot tool, launched just over a year ago, now documents more than 1.3 million doctor-patient encounters each month across more than 500 US healthcare groups.
Nuance, which Microsoft bought for nearly $20 billion in 2022, 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 tried Nuance’s AI-powered notepad in 2024, and two-thirds of users said it saved time.
The AI-generated notes were 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.
Nonetheless, the results prompted Stanford to plan to roll out DAX Copilot to all of its providers.
Sood said that while he checks every report the Nabla app generates, the cognitive load of simultaneously writing and listening during a consultation is greatly “minimized, if not completely eliminated” by the tool.
“You can focus more on the patient, listen, be more present, understand their body language. Now I enjoyed the consultations more,” he added.
However, the rise of medical note-taking has prompted criticism from researchers about the dangers of artificial intelligence-generated concoctions, known as “hallucinations,” which could be particularly harmful in a medical context, as well as the issue of patient data privacy.
Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Virginia analyzed thousands of snippets of Whisper-generated transcripts from 2023 and found that approximately 1 percent of audio transcriptions contained “whole hallucinated phrases or sentences that did not exist in any form in the underlying audio”.
About 40 percent of the hallucinations involved harmful fictional content, such as replaying violence or inventing false 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 there, but . . . for me personally, it was a big shift.”
