SingHealth pilots GPT tool for clinician notes to improve patient-doctor interactions

The next time you visit a SingHealth institution, you might notice your doctor typing less and paying more attention to you – thanks to a generative AI (GenAI) tool summarising and developing clinical notes in real time.

Singapore public healthcare cluster, SingHealth, has been progressively launching Note Buddy, a GenAI-powered documentation tool, across all its institutions from September 4 this year to assist healthcare professionals in note taking during consultations.

SingHealth is the regional health cluster that oversees 1.5 million Singaporeans across North and Central Singapore.

The tool taps on the ability of generative pre-trained transformer (GPTs) to automatically transcribe and summarise doctor-patient conversations in real-time, and even across Singapore’s four main languages – English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

Customised for the clinical setting, the tool comes with prompts to guide summaries and generate precise clinical notes.

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Clinical judgement still key

For Singapore General Hospital (SGH)’s Senior Consultant of the Department of Endocrinology, Associate Professor Goh Su-Yen, the core advantage of this tool is its ability to ambient scribe.

Instead of only recording and transcribing raw transcripts, ambient scribe taps on GenAI to summarise the conversations and produce meaningful information for the clinician.

The clinician's judgement is still necessary when it comes to reviewing and editing the notes, before uploading it into the electronic medical record (EMR) system, she highlighted at a media demonstration on September 9.

Responding to GovInsider’s inquiry on how well the tool performs when it comes to prioritising information across different medical conditions, Assoc Prof Goh said that the tool picks up on which information is critical based on the questions asked by the clinician.

Over time, the tool continually learns from clinicians on what information to prioritise for different conditions.

Currently, the tool can only be used for verbal interactions, but can automatically distinguish the doctor, patient and caregiver without any prior prompts, she said.

Instead of only selecting from pre-set prompts, healthcare professionals can also customise their own prompts to meet specific professional requirements and tasks.

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Onboarding in Singapore’s largest healthcare group

SingHealth is targeting to roll out the tool to all clinicians in all its institutions by the end of 2024.

The healthcare professional will have to seek the patient’s consent to have the transcription tool assist with documentation in a consultation setting.

The patient can inform the professional to pause the recording at any point as well.

To maintain patient privacy and confidentiality, each healthcare professional can only access their own notes, which are securely stored in the system for one month before they get deleted.

Assoc Prof Goh shared that there have been multiple iterative cycles performed by clinicians from different disciplines and SingHealth’s Division of Digital Strategy to hone the tool.

SingHealth has also put in place online trainings, help centres for physical training and assistance, as well as nominating “clinical champions” from each department to encourage and guide the use of the tool.

Synapxe’s secure, common GPT platform enables wider rollout

The tool has been launched on a secure GPT platform, known as Tandem, developed by the national health tech agency Synapxe.

By leveraging a common platform like Tandem, GenAI innovations such as Note Buddy can eventually be deployed across other public healthcare institutions, said Synapxe’s Director of Data aNalytics and AI, and Chief Data Officer, Andy Ta, in an official statement.

The platform integrates Microsoft’s Azure Open AI service. The platform aims to enable healthcare professionals to access advanced technology securely and efficiently.

Earlier this year, GovInsider reported on Synapxe’s initiatives to build the capacities of the public healthcare institutions by partnering with tech partners. These initiatives included training, as well as co-creating GenAI innovations in healthcare.

The adoption of GenAI and artificial intelligence (AI) is underway for all the public healthcare clusters in Singapore.

SingHealth’s Group Chief Digital Strategy Officer, Benedict Tan, highlighted the transformative potential of GenAI to positively impact patients’ lives when integrated with other digital technologies.

Another public healthcare cluster, the National University Health System (NUHS), is also currently deploying its GenAI-powered RUSSELL-GPT to draft referrals and memos, summarise patient data, and perform other tasks.

This has reduced the time spent by clinicians on administrative tasks by 40 per cent, said NUHS’ Head of Academic Informatics Office, Dr Ngiam Kee Yuan, to GovInsider.

The National Healthcare Group (NHG) is deploying AI for lung, heart disease screening via another common platform, AI Medical Imaging Platform for Singapore’s Public Healthcare (AimSG), developed by Synapxe, SingHealth and NTT Data.