GPs trial ‘digital assistants’

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

ProCare has been trialling a suite of ‘digital assistants’ to help take the pressure off overworked GPs, by giving repetitive manual tasks to robots to complete.

Paul Roseman, ProCare’s general manager strategic development, says the digital assistants use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automatically complete tasks that would usually be done by a human and are primarily to address the health workforce crisis.

ProCare has worked with a small number of general practices to test around 14 robots so far and is currently pursuing up to eight to offer as a service to practices. Many of these are around managing GP practice inbox messages, some complete clinical tasks while others are related to HR and finance.

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One digital assistant has been successful at performing a Cardiovascular Disease Risk Assessment (CVDRA) using data in the practice management system (PMS). It logs into the PMS as if it is a person, then performs the same tasks a human would to calculate the risk score for patients.

The assistant recognises a normal result, adds information to the PMS, and creates action lists based on high risk scores to recall patients for management, or for missing data to generate lab test forms or recalls to get more up to date information to calculate risk.

For a human to complete the task takes on average 3.5 minutes, but the assistant does it in 20 seconds.

“In general practice you spend a lot of time trying to work out who you need to spend time with,” Roseman explains.

“The digital assistants create action-oriented lists for GPs and nurses so they know who they need to see.”

At one practice, the completion of the CVD risk assessment was at around 40 percent before the robot was introduced and within a year it was at 80-90 percent.

Where digital assistants are managing inbox messages, the types of messages are carefully considered before developing a robot, and abnormal results are left in the inbox for the clinician to handle.

Roseman says ProCare will expand the offering over time as the potential for RPA is huge in general practice.

“Come November we aim to have a full suite of assistants available to use,” he says.

GP Jamie Shepherd says the number of inbox messages he receives almost doubled between 2017 – 2021 and the increase in volume is unsustainable. Processing these is mostly unpaid work on top of a busy clinical schedule.

He started thinking about what could be done in a different way and saw robots as a way to deal with some inbox messages without the need for human intervention.

“This is fraught with clinical challenges, so you need a strong governance process around it to ensure we are not creating risk for patients or providers,” Shepherd explains.

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