Hamilton Health Sciences introduces artificial intelligence tool

Hamilton Health Sciences is exploring the use of artificial intelligence with the goal of allowing family doctors to see more patients and spend more time with them.

This new AI tool could also speed up access to medical notes for patients.

It’s called DAX Copilot, an AI-powered medical tool that will help doctors like Blake Yarascavitch at McMaster Children’s Hospital create medical notes during patient visits.

“So, when we have patients come in for a patient encounter, what we do is we have our devices listen to the encounter—what I say and what the patient says—and then it takes that information and puts it into an artificial intelligence large language model, which then creates the clinical notes based on the information gathered in the encounter,” says Yarascavitch.

He also says this new innovation will help doctors see more patients.

Blake says, “before, what I’d have to do is probably take ten or fifteen minutes in between to complete my documentation and move on to the next.”

During her visit today, Marissa Connel used DAX Copilot.

She says she’s happy to be able to see the notes taken from her visit in her health records right away.

“It’s great that after leaving the appointment, I will have access right away to all of the notes,” Marissa said.

Currently, 35 physicians across different departments at Hamilton Health Sciences, including emergency departments, are using this tool.

Dr. Yarascavitch believes AI assistance will allow doctors to focus their undivided attention on patients and says that while the tool will help create notes for patients, doctors will still need to verify the information to ensure accuracy.

Mohit Rajhans with Think Start says that while there are many benefits to using artificial intelligence in medical spaces, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

“There is a massive digital divide that still exists in this country, where in some cases, doctor’s offices don’t even have medical records that are digitized, and in other cases, you can’t even get the proper bandwidth needed to use AI infrastructure on your phone or through mobility,” says Rajhans.

The pilot program, which launched in September, is expected to run for ten months.