An Automated Assistant for Medical Scribes

Healthcare professionals spend a significant amount of their time on administrative tasks rather than direct patient care. One effective way to alleviate some of this burden is to employ a medical scribe, who charts patient-physician encounters in real time. We present a complete implementation of an automated medical scribe assistant, which listens to the encounter and produces a draft of report text and the information used to create it, which can dramatically streamline the scribe’s task. This system is, to our knowledge, the first automated scribe ever presented and relies on multiple speech and language technologies, including speaker diarization, medical speech recognition, knowledge extraction and natural language generation.