Tend launches AI-powered medical scribe for GPs

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Kiwi-owned hybrid healthcare provider Tend has developed and launched an AI-powered medical scribe being used by its GPs across the country. 

Tend Scribe has drafted clinical notes and patient instructions for over 12,000 consultations already and Tend’s chief medical officer Graham Denyer says early data shows increased appointment efficiency and improved patient satisfaction. 

He says Tend developed Scribe inhouse to save time for GPs by helping to create accurate clinical documentation of appointments.

The AI tool transcribes consultations and automatically generates clinical notes using the large language model Claude Sonnet from Anthropic.

Scribe went live for Tend’s telehealth service in April and around 80 percent of GPs in the service have chosen to use it. The healthcare provider recently expanded Scribe’s use to in-person clinic visits as well.

Denyer says Scribe allows GPs to spend more time engaging directly with patients, knowing the tool is reliably capturing and organising relevant medical information.

As well as reducing the GP's documentation workload, it creates an easy to read summary of the appointment that patients can view via the app, outlining any safety netting, prescriptions and next steps. 

Denyer says patients have been extremely positive about the summaries they receive and says the patient consent rate is very high, with only a couple of people opting out. 

He adds that the integration of Scribe within Tend’s ecosystem means it has huge potential. In the future, it could connect to relevant patient history and context, such as prior medications or consultation notes, creating a more accurate and meaningful clinical record. 

“By giving more context to these models, we will be able to get high-quality outputs,” Denyer explains.

Tend chief operating officer Josh Robb says he started exploring AI scribe tools around May 2023 and soon decided the organisation would need to build its own. 

“It became clear that we were going to want to be able to do a lot of clinical safety work around this, and really deeply embed this into a model of care and our operating model in our tool chain, and that the benefits of these kinds of tools would only be realised if we could achieve those things,” he explains.

Tend Scribe is hosted and entirely within Amazon Web Services and managed to ensure compliance with New Zealand’s privacy guidelines and allows Tend to maintain complete control over its data.

“We are not giving this really sensitive health information to any third parties for any purpose at all. We are totally retaining it within our own systems and controls,” Robb says.

Denyer says this is just the beginning of a larger journey for Tend.

“The impact on data quality and continuity of care over time is going to be transformational,” he says.

Hear more from Graham Denyer and Josh Robb about Tend Scribe at Digital Health Week NZ this Dec 2-5 in Hamilton. Check out the programme online.

Image: Tend’s chief medical officer Graham Denyer

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