(From HealthIT News, April 5, 2018)
Vanderbilt creates AI and natural language processing voice assistant for its Epic EHR
Caregivers can interact with the EHR using natural language queries and more quickly get the answers they need in an unobtrusive manner.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center has developed a voice assistant for caregivers to use navigating the hospital's Epic electronic health record.
The new tool processes requests using natural language processing and understanding technology, and not just macros, officials say – noting that it could represent an important paradigm shift in how providers interact with their EHRs in more natural and intuitive ways.
The name of the voice assistant is V-EVA, which stands for Vanderbilt EHR Voice Assistant. The Vanderbilt University Medical Center Department of Biomedical informatics and Health Information Technology Innovations developed it.
"The idea to develop an in-house voice assistant came from the general frustration we heard from users about the difficulty navigating the EHR to find relevant information," said Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD, eStar Core design advisor, assistant professor of biomedical informatics and assistant professor of pediatric endocrinology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt.
"There is a lot of information foraging that occurs in the EHR, although users often know the precise pieces of data they need to understand a clinical picture," she said.
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