Saykara Launches Conversational AI Breakthrough

SEATTLE, March 3, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Saykara today announced the launch of the first ambient and autonomous voice assistant technology for healthcare. The launch is a major step forward in building to Saykara's vision of an artificially intelligent exam room voice assistant that seamlessly listens to any physician-patient conversation without voice commands, captures conversation meaning and documents encounters in real-time, flawlessly, and without any need for "human in the loop" scribe review. Saykara will demonstrate the breakthrough at HIMSS 2020, booth #7273-26 in the Intelligent Health Pavilion.

Despite industry noise, no other AI-powered healthcare voice assistant has the ability to simultaneously operate ambiently (without voice commands) and to autonomously listen to and capture meaning from a physician-patient conversation. Other AI-powered healthcare assistants instead fall into one of two camps: dictation-driven voice technology or command-driven voice AI technology. With the former (dictation), voice assistants can listen to an entire conversation, capturing only the words spoken to produce a simple transcript. With the latter (command--driven), voice assistants listen only when physicians use commands, capturing and documenting meaning from short instructional phrases.

Saykara's ability to ambiently and autonomously extract and document meaning from conversations in real-time is underpinned by technology that enables "discretization.' By 'discretizing' conversations, Saykara listens, captures and transforms conversational content into discrete data points, then makes them queryable and open to analysis. This process allows Saykara to:

• Summarize and Synthesize: in listening in on a full physician-patient conversation, Saykara aims to create a summary or synthesis that provides healthcare providers with a human representation of what was discussed. For an exam conversation related to shoulder pain, Saykara might focus on what it determines (discretizes) to be the 200 most salient points that were stated. These points of fact then help create a human, readable SOAP note (subjective, objective, assessment, and plan).
• Learn and Recognize Patterns: the process of discretization taking place over tens of thousands of conversations is what allows Saykara to establish patterns across types of physician-patient encounters. In the instance of the shoulder pain exam, Saykara can identify patterns unique to acute shoulder pain from a bike injury, patterns unique to chronic shoulder pain from repetitive strain and so on and so forth. Saykara refers to patterns specific to a kind of physician-patient as Encounter Pathways.

Taken holistically, Saykara's approach to conversational voice AI for doctors is a stepping stone to AI eventually serving as a broader, augmentative technology for doctors across any medical specialty. At launch, Saykara's real-time autonomous interpretation technology (no back-end human review) is available for select Encounter Pathways in Orthopedics.

"Saykara has been built on the core belief that conversational AI can not only solve physician burnout and improve job satisfaction, but that it is the single most important foundational technology for healthcare in the next decade," said Harjinder Sandhu, CEO, Saykara. "Up until now, AI has made an impact with access to medical imaging, lab results and patient history. Now we're at AI's next frontier in medicine. Much like autonomous cars learned from shadowing human drivers, Kara is shadowing doctors and learning from the incredibly rich data available from exam room conversations."

"To a large degree, the day-to-day practice of modern medicine has been hijacked by electronic documentation that serves billing. I didn't get into medicine to spend hours of my day doing data entry on a computer," said Matt Fradkin, MD, Pediatrician, Providence St. Joseph Health. "As an early adopter of Saykara, I saw an immediate reduction in my charting time, meaning I was able to spend more time more time at home with my family, more time with patients and more time on all of the parts of medicine that bring me joy. Over the past two years, I've seen Kara get faster and better, with almost no delay between a patient encounter and clinic note. I'm looking forward to the efficiency improvements a fully autonomous system can introduce into my day-to-day."

Saykara's launch of its autonomous offering follows its industry-first introduction of a ambient healthcare voice assistant in 2019. Saykara currently serves 18 disparate healthcare specialties, including primary care, pediatrics, internal medicine, orthopedics, urology and more, and has onboarded 25 healthcare organizations. Customers include Providence Saint Joseph Hospital, Swedish Medical Group, Providence Kadlec, Hancock Hospital, MultiCare Health System and OrthoIndy Hospital, among others.

Saykara adoption to date has been spurred by its immediate impact on physician quality of life and work-life balance. Physicians are often forced to choose between typing in an EHR during patient exams, potentially eroding doctor-to-patient interaction and perceived service levels, or spending hours at night dictating or entering information and forfeiting personal downtime. This 'off hours' documentation burden is a leading cause of physician dissatisfaction and burnout and one of the most pressing problems facing the healthcare industry today. Saykara cuts overall documentation by 70 percent and completely eliminates the need for physician after-hours charting, saving doctors two to three hours per day.

About Saykara
Saykara has introduced healthcare's first fully ambient and autonomous AI-powered virtual assistant, seamlessly supporting physicians through all aspects of the patient encounter. Remove pain from the clinical documentation process, reduce physician burnout and add joy into patient visits. Saykara automates critical workflows and provides smart and scalable solutions for healthcare organizations, regardless of specialty. The team combines deep clinical and tech experience to provide a unique approach that offers customers an affordable, high-quality, personalized experience from day one. Visit www.saykara.com, @SaykaraHealth or email [email protected] for more information.

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SOURCE Saykara

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