Not as a sustainable business model, at least.
Patient AI scribes will not take off as independent, sustainable businesses.
I know, strange for me to say that, right? But hear me out.
First, I know that sounds weird coming from a guy who literally started a health tech company that engages and empowers patients.
But I’m also a guy who has spent 13 years understanding the gut wrenching, practical realities of what healthcare innovations do and don’t work as actual self-sustaining businesses.
And the more I think about what it takes for a patient AI scribe company to thrive independently, the way that AI scribes for clinicians have spread like wildfire for companies – well, I just don’t see it.
With AI scribes for clinicians, you are starting with a massive, huge pain point. Some physicians have dozens and dozens of patient visits a day. Documentation is a huge recurring problem.
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When you have a daily, high-frequency headache, the situation is ripe for a painkiller you would pay for.
But for the vast majority of patients, a doctor’s visit is a “once in a while” thing. Even for a patient with complex care needs, those visits are rarely daily.
Yes, it might feel like a huge headache for some patients in that moment, but the frequency often won’t justify searching for, signing up, and trusting a patient AI scribe even if it’s free – let alone paying for an AI scribe with money or your data (which let’s be honest, for those free AI scribes, you’re paying for it somehow).
In other words, for most patients an AI scribe would be a vitamin. And even for the subset of patients who want a scribe, most will just start by recording and throwing the transcription into ChatGPT.
Which means the market for patient AI scribes is just going to be too small to lead to a sustainable, scalable business.
Related
The most likely way a patient AI scribe at scale exists is if the scribe is a side feature of a more sustainable core product – for example, ChatGPT for Health just adds it to its core patient platform.
So even if only 10% of users ever use it regularly, it doesn’t matter to them. But a patient AI scribe as a core product?
As much as it helps patients, I just don’t see how it works independently to survive.
Dr Joshua Liu is a Canadian physician turned cofounder/CEO of SeamlessMD, a health tech company which enables CMIOs, CIOs and health systems to digitise patient care journeys with automated reminders, education and symptom monitoring – leading to lower length of stay, readmissions and costs.
This article was first published on Dr Liu’s LinkedIn feed. Read the original article here.