SingHealth’s New Digital Recordkeeping Tool: A Promising Tool to Reduce Documentation Burden?
To assist healthcare professionals in clinical note-taking during consultations, SingHealth, Singapore’s largest healthcare organisation, is trialling a new tool.
Note Buddy, described as an all-around digital note-taker, is capable of recording patient interactions in the country’s four official languages - English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.
The tool, developed by SingHealth’s Digital Strategy Division, records conversations with patients and transcribes them through speech-to-text software. It then generates structured medical summaries using genAI.
Healthcare IT News visited the Diabetes and Metabolic Centre at Singapore General Hospital, a tertiary hospital within the SingHealth network, to see how Note Buddy works.
Voice and speech recognition
Dr Goh Su-Yen, Senior Consultant at the Department of Endocrinology at SGH, led a demonstration of the tool through a mock patient consultation with a member of our team. Our colleague spoke in both English and Tamil.
Note Buddy created a rough transcript of the consultation, followed by a summary with clearly defined items such as medical history, social functioning, ongoing symptoms, and even potential prognosis for the clinician to review.
However, we found that the system did not fully capture all the spoken Tamil words because these words were spoken too quickly or used too little.
If a doctor knows a patient’s preferred language, they can select that option in Note Buddy, says Dr. Goh. She goes on to explain that many languages can still be detected and translated by the platform as long as they are spoken clearly in the majority of the sentence.
The tool also responded to prompts from clinicians. When our colleague said he had “pain in his mid to lower back,” Dr. Goh responded with the medical term commonly used to describe that area (i.e., chest area). This detail was recorded in the medical summary.
Dr Goh showed how Note Buddy could recognise her as a doctor in a conversation, and added that the tool would be able to recognise information from other people – such as caregivers – who are also present in the conversation.
Refinement from clinicians remains important
We found a small error in the summary. For example, the tool included the word “anorexia” in the summary after hearing that our colleague was taking Anarex to manage his back pain. He also mentioned that he had digestive issues when taking the drug on an empty stomach.
Dr Goh said it could be because the system had taken her advice to “always eat before taking painkillers” or that the word Anarex was not pronounced clearly enough.
She emphasized the need for clear communication and post-consultation testing to optimize Note Buddy.
“This is why we make sure that clinicians are aware that [Note Buddy] “I just record the conversations. For example, for a cancer patient, I may have plans such as chemotherapy that were not made clear during the consultation. That’s when I can amend my notes after the consultation,” said Dr Goh.
Improve patient care
SingHealth has launched Note Buddy so that healthcare professionals can focus on engaging with patients during their visits and reduce the administrative burden associated with paperwork.
In addition to note-taking and multilingual support, the tool’s features include customizable reminders and secure note retrieval. Clinicians can only access their own notes to maximize patient data security, and the platform deletes notes from the system after 1 month to protect data on a regular basis.
Dr Goh shares, “Using Note Buddy allows me to interact more meaningfully with patients and reduces the cognitive burden of having to manually type out what was discussed. I find the notes captured by Note Buddy to be very accurate.
“The system can even prioritize and selectively capture relevant and appropriate parts of a patient’s medical history. Now I can give my patients my full attention during consultations.”
Note Buddy is now accessible at all SingHealth facilities.
