I-Corps: Assessing Market Opportunities for an Automated Clinical Documentation Service with Data Capture Designed for Secondary Use

Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact and commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to make physicians more efficient and improve the quality of patient care. Potential short term societal and commercial impact includes improved quality of life for physicians, increased capacity for physicians to see more patients, and greater ability for physician to focus on the patient thereby enhancing the quality of healthcare service delivery. Physicians spend over half their day working with electronic health record systems and typically spend an additional 1.5 hours on clinical documentation at the end of their day. In the long term, the potential societal and commercial impact is improved quality of care as this work develops a learning health system where the technology can learn from the care of each patient to inform the care of future patients. This I-Corps process will reveal the value that the intended product can deliver in making physicians more efficient and improving the quality of patient care across market segments (i.e., clinical specialty, care delivery method) as well as better understand the key opportunities, challenges, and stakeholders across segments. The proposed technology captures clinical documentation in a structured format ready to be utilized by machine learning algorithms in order to enhance physician efficiency by reducing the documentation burden. Additionally, the datasets can be used to support various needs of health systems including quality improvement, clinical research, operational efficiency, and billing support. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.