Since the change to electronic health records or EHRs in the United States accelerated a decade ago, the day-to-day impact on doctors is staggering. To keep records current and to keep the user, physicians have to make sure that all of the records of patient interactions are recorded, meaning that a large part of their day is spent staring at a screen rather than taking care of their patients. Recent studies show that doctors may spend as much as half of their workday filling out the records of their interactions with patients. This causes doctors to cut their patient appointments in half.
"In an ideal world, physicians would just interact with patients," Saykara founder and CEO Harjinder Sandhu told Forbes. "That's what they want to do. They don't want to type notes."
His company that is Seattle-based has a proposed solution, it is an application that records a doctor's interactions with patients, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to hone in on key points of the doctor's side of the conversation and appropriately document on the HER, leaving the doctor free to focus fully on their patients. A new update to Saykara software passively records in the office without requiring activation, making operation even easier for doctors, who previously had to start recording everything manually.
Sandhu is an entrepreneur who launched three companies successfully, all of which are operating at the intersection of healthcare and voice recognition software. The former York University computer science professor launched MedRemote, a physician transcription software company, in 2000. Following its acquisition by Nuance Communications in 2005, Sandhu stayed with the company for 6 more years before he went on to co-founding Twistle, which helps doctors automate follow-up patient care. Saykara, launched in 2015, is a logical step in advancing healthcare software.
"A lot of physicians don't like to spend time at the screen while they're with their patients," he says. "So they end up doing all their documentation in the evenings-so much time working leads to burnout."
Sandhu's goal for Saykara is simple but ambitious, he wants to create a completely seamless experience in which the sophisticated software extracts the relevant information from doctor-patient conversations without getting derailed by tangents. In the short term, Saykara focuses on the voice of physicians as they actively listen to the symptoms and repeat them back to their patients. Doctors must review each patient interaction transcribed by Saykara to ensure it is accurate, but even then, the company claims it is reducing the time spent writing notes by as much as 70%.
