Google looks to utilise AI to further overhaul the GP-patient relationship

It has recently been announced that Google is set to invest in a new research project, Medical Digital Assist, in order to further transform the GP-patient experience through voice recognition and touch technologies, CNBC reports.

Part of its Google AI division, the project will deliver a world-class Ai speech recognition system, and is collaborating with Stanford Medical to support electronic health records (EHRs)

"It is even more complicated than we originally thought," stated Dr Steven Lin, a Stanford physician heading the research with Google.

"If solved, it can potentially unshackle physicians from EHRs and bring providers back to the joys of medicine: actually interacting with patients."

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Physicians are placing increased focus on inputting patient notes, rather than on the patient experience. Such technologies could switch such ratios and enhance the patient experience across the healthcare spectrum.

To this end, the company will be ramping up its recruitment and development efforts and is looking for a new medical assist project manager, who can bolster new business deals and be responsible for all commercial and legal concerns.

The news follows on from a recent blog outlining the tech giant’s plans to transform the input of data within EHR’s by utilising voice recognition technology and medical scribes to support GPs in their everyday roles.

"In “Speech Recognition for Medical Conversations,” we show that it is possible to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for transcribing medical conversations," Google explains.

“While most of the current solutions in medical domain focus on transcribing doctor dictations (i.e., single speaker speech consisting of predictable medical terminology), Google’s research shows that it is possible to build a model which can handle multiple speaker conversations covering everything from weather to complex medical diagnosis,” the company added.