3–5 minutes saved per clinical note
With Platform24’s AI assistant NoteAssist, staff save between 3 and 5 minutes per clinical note. Every minute saved is of course valuable, but the gain is not only about time. An equally important effect is reduced administrative burden and a better working environment for employees.
Medtanken is a Swedish healthcare provider running healthcare centers, rehab centers and specialist hospitals, with a focus on digital care and same-day treatment through collaboration between units.
Peter Skenk is a psychologist and operations developer for mental health at Medtanken. Together with his colleagues, he meets patients with mental health issues in primary care. Many have sought help before without finding the right support, while others have hesitated to seek care and waited a long time before getting in touch. For patients with mental health problems, it is often important to get the right support and help quickly, to achieve good treatment outcomes and reduced suffering. An important goal for the organisation is therefore to reduce the time spent on administration and free up capacity for the efforts that create the most value for patients. NoteAssist is part of that work: by making documentation more efficient, healthcare’s limited resources can be used where they do the most good.
For Peter Skenk, the impact on the working environment is one of the most important effects:„I would say the biggest gain with NoteAssist is how it affects the working environment, above all by reducing the stress staff experience,“ says Peter Skenk.
“Compiling referral documentation for psychiatry can take many hours. With the help of NoteAssist, this work can often be done in an hour”
The difference the tool makes is clearest in the most time-consuming cases. Those who use NoteAssist create on average six to seven notes per day. Even though the time saving is most noticeable in long visits, the tool can create great value even in shorter follow-up visits:
„We handle a lot of information at our first visits with patients and everything needs to be captured and documented. I think we can gain a lot by also using NoteAssist in shorter follow-up visits. The note becomes more complete with NoteAssist, even in cases where I don’t always gain much time.“
It is well known that patients often find it hard to remember all the information given during a care visit. Here too, NoteAssist can make a big difference, by giving the patient an easily accessible summary of the visit:
„This is absolutely fantastic, I can take a summary of our visit with me straight away, in simple language that I can understand.“
Peter also sees opportunities to develop the function further, for example by letting AI summarise a whole treatment period and, in a structured way, formulate the plan for the patient’s continued work and long-term wellbeing.
Figures refer to the parts of Medtanken where NoteAssist is used.
But NoteAssist is more than a transcription service. Because the tool is integrated into Platform24’s care platform, the note draft can also pull in relevant information that already exists in the patient’s current care case, for example answers from forms and chat. The information is synthesised with what emerges during the conversation and structured according to the organisation’s own record templates.
Through integration with the record system, the note can then be exported to the electronic health record (EHR). Healthcare staff review the content and are responsible for the note before it is signed.
When AI is used in healthcare, secure handling of patient data is a basic prerequisite. Platform24 is certified to ISO 27001 for information security and handles data in accordance with GDPR. Before information is passed on for AI processing, all patient data is anonymised.
Behind the results lies just over a year of close collaboration between Medtanken and the supplier Platform24. Platform24 first built the technical infrastructure and adapted how the information is structured to Medtanken’s record templates. Since then, the two teams have together fine-tuned the instructions to the AI system based on how healthcare staff actually work in everyday practice. For Peter Skenk, the ability to continuously improve the tool is an important part of the development:
„There are of course things that need further development with NoteAssist, and we give Platform24 feedback regularly,“ says Skenk.
For Medtanken, the value of NoteAssist lies not only in the clinical note being finished faster. When documentation takes less time and energy, important capacity is freed up in the organisation, which in turn makes room for everything from teamwork and referral handling to treatment and feedback to patients. More efficient documentation can be of great importance for the organisation, far beyond the clinical note itself.