Before a patient visit, many doctors have a single, deceptively complicated question: "Why is this person seeing me?"
Patients are complex, so doctors have a lot of homework to do for every person they see. Everyone, from an infant to a centenarian, has a unique medical history that constantly grows with wide-ranging data from things like test results, scans, family histories, prescriptions, treatments, and referrals, all documented and integrated over time in their health records. What led a patient to stepping into their doctor's office could be a combination of all, some, or none of that data.
Enter Chart Hero, a new generative artificial intelligence-powered, chat-based system created at Penn Medicine's Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation (CHTI) in partnership with the Penn Medicine Data and Technology Solutions (DTS) team and clinical leaders in the health system.
Clinicians can ask Chart Hero, which appears like a sidebar in the electronic health record, to help them automatically gather, arrange, synthesize, and assist in the interpretation of all the pertinent information they'd need for a patient they're going to see, and do it in a minute or two with a couple simple queries instead of digging through piles of data in multiple areas of the electronic health record.
A clinician using Chart Hero is like a paleontologist who can just summon the bones of a Tyrannosaurus, pre-assembled, out of the rock in front of them instead of spending years digging into the side of a cliff.
"It saves so much time that I would spend very inefficiently searching for an answer to my questions," said Tessa Cook, MD, PhD, an associate professor of Radiology and vice chair of Practice Transformation in that department. "There was a day when it wasn't available, and I thought, 'I have to figure all of this out by myself? Are you kidding?'"
