Doctolib gives in to the sirens of artificial intelligence and now welcomes an intelligent medical assistant powered by AI to write reports of consultations. Enough to make life much easier for practitioners!
Doctolib, the platform used to make medical appointments online, is gradually adding new functions, including a touch of AI! The service, now well anchored in customs, has evolved significantly since its creation ten years ago, in particular by popularizing teleconsultation, a service available without additional costs or different reimbursement formalities.
Since this year, the platform has offered Patient Messaging and allows you to pay online for a physical consultation, directly from the site or the application as soon as you make an appointment (see our article). She also announced that practitioners would soon be able to benefit from a real medical assistant. After a test phase launched last June, Doctolib is finally deploying it this October 15, as it announced in a blog post. It is accessible to all general practitioner clients of the platform.
Medical assistant on Doctolib: no more need to take notes!
Created in collaboration with 350 caregivers in France, the medical assistant is capable of producing a complete report of a consultation by listening and analyzing conversations. It can also classify requests made to practitioners according to their level of urgency. It can also ensure, thanks to a voice recognition system, the real-time transcription of consultations, the preparation of treatment plans, the drafting of letters of address or even access to medical resources.
The goal is to save professionals time, allowing them to carry out up to 20% more consultations. Since they don’t have to write anything down, they will be able to give more time and attention to their patients. Obviously, they check the information taken by the AI before validating it and recording it in medical records.
Obviously, bringing artificial intelligence into the privacy of a medical consultation raises questions about data confidentiality as well as ethical questions. Also, use of the assistant requires explicit consent from the patient.
The deployment of AI is done in stages. For the moment, only general practitioners and pediatricians can benefit from it, but other medical specialties should have access to it by the end of the year. This gradual approach allows Doctolib to refine its tool for each medical field. Practitioners can test the tool free of charge for one month, after which they will have to pay 79 euros monthly.
Doctolib: a future reference in AI in the medical field
But Doctolib does not intend to stop there and is banking heavily on artificial intelligence! “AI will make it possible to increase the performance of the services we already offer, and to design new products that we could not even imagine ten years ago”Stanislas Niox-Chateau, co-founder of the company, enthusiastically declared, at Figaro last June. The latter plans to invest 100 million euros this year in the development of new solutions based on AI, and hire one hundred new employees to strengthen the teams of engineers and developers.
In addition to the consultation assistant, Doctolib is working on an intelligent answering machine, a tool already deployed in Germany and which should be available in France by 2025. It allows patients to make an appointment by telephone by conversing with an AI, which can even detect the urgency of a situation from the tone of voice. A “prevention assistant” should also arrive by 2025, in order to improve the monitoring of vaccinations, screenings and chronic diseases.
The platform hopes to become “a benchmark for AI in Europe”. It has 40 million patients registered in France and 500 million appointments made each year in France, but also in Germany and Italy, for 340,000 health personnel listed online. In Germany alone, it has 20 million users.