Enhancing patient treatment through automation: The development of an efficient scribe and prescribe system

Abstract

Making scribes and prescriptions are the primary activities for a health professional to serve the patients. Although in most of the cases these tasks are pursued manually, a few studies focused on developing digital scribe generation and prescription systems. Moreover, to enhance the effectiveness and adoption of such digital scribe and prescription systems, these systems should be intelligent and useable enough. Therefore, the objective of this research is to understand the user requirements for developing an automated scribes and intelligent prescribing system for health professionals and to develop the automated scribes and intelligent prescribing system based on the revealed users' requirements. And finally, to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. To attain these objectives, a requirement elicitation study was carried out following the semi-structured interviews to reveal the user requirements for an intelligent scribe and prescription system. The study proposed an automated digital scribe that can record medical information adopting the LSTM model; and also be able to generate automated prescriptions based on a doctor's voice command. Finally, the system was evaluated through an empirical study where participants (doctors) were asked to generate scribes and provide prescriptions manually and also by using the proposed system. The study found that the scribes and prescriptions generated using the proposed system are highly similar to the scribes (87.5 %) and prescriptions (96.2 %) generated manually. Analysis of the evaluation results also showed that the system provides a user-friendly, easy-to-use, intuitive, and interactive interface to facilitate the doctors and clinicians.

Keywords

• Digital scribes
• Natural language processing
• Machine learning
• Voice-to-text conversion
• Text summarization
• Medical term extraction