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How Clerical Work Burns Doctors Out · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: What was that light bulb moment that you decided to to okay, your funding is research?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Carnegie Mellon, by the way, is a international center, machine learning, comp computer science, and AI.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a really a fabulous kind of neighborhood of tech thinking to fund great research.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: But what what was the light bulb moment when you decided, okay, we're gonna go for this?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because even in 2018, while academically the runway was getting closer, or we were closer to landing the plane of AI, it was still a little bit foggy as to what where we're we were where we were gonna land.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we started the company just a few months after Google Research had published their paper, Attention Is All You Need.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And transformers were certainly already being used in the research community.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And these transformer-based models that we started with predated LLMs.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so we started with models like Bird and ByerBird, long form of Pegasus T5.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were spending millions of dollars on expert annotation so that we could fine-tune these models to be able to work for this use case.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the aha moment or the light bulb moment for me from the problem standpoint was really twofold.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: One is my dad's a cardiologist.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: He retired because he couldn't type fast enough.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing crushes my soul as a doctor more than clerical work.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to focus on the person in front of me and deliver the best possible experience and outcome.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And everything else is noise and everything else is overhead.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it's an unfortunate part of the job, but can we find, could we find a way to build technology that could take a lot of that burden away?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the other aha moment for me was a patient.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So in March of 2018 in my clinic, I saw this patient, 10-year history of breast cancer.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: She was about to start doxarubicin, which could impact her heart muscle.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: She needed clearance essentially from me as a cardiologist.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: She was super nervous and anxious, crawling out of her skin.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I asked her why at some point.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And she told me that for the last 10 years, her husband had come to every single visit with a new doctor, except this one, he just couldn't make it.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked her, she's an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I asked her, what does he do that's not obvious?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And she told me that he sits in the corner, he's quiet, he just takes notes.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And she told me that him taking notes meant that she could feel liberated to be more present, to build a relationship with the clinician, go back home and unpack all the notes, all the big words, rewrite their stories in words they understood using Google, you know, obviously pre-Chat GPT, and then go to the next clinician and feel like the main characters of their story, retelling it as opposed to someone looking in from the outside.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so the for me, the aha moment was what she was struggling with in her chronic disease journey agency.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's control, it's being able to build relationships, be present first.