Scribenote leverages AI to save veterinarians time on note-taking

Sponsored by Scribenote

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: Hey everyone, I'm Dr Adam Christman, Chief Veterinary Officer here at dvm360. Welcome to Product360! We're going to be chatting with our friends at Scribenote. We have Ryan Gallagher, CEO of Scribenote, chatting with us about making our lives easier and helping with our SOAP notes and workflow utilization. I'm really curious to learn more about this because we hear a lot about AI technology. I want to back up a little bit—tell us how Scribenote came to fruition.

Ryan Gallagher: Scribenote came to fruition in the earlier days of AI. Back in 2019, I was a university student and I noticed my older sister, Dr Katie Gallagher, who is a practicing veterinarian, coming home late all the time—an hour and a half, two hours late, always missing family dinner.

I was an engineering student, so I thought maybe there was something I could do to help. I followed her into the clinic as a fly on the wall. What I saw that day was the thing keeping her late was her medical records. These were often near duplications of what she’d been talking about all day long: Why is Fluffy here? What’s wrong with Fluffy? What are we going to do about it?

That forms the basis of the medical record. I thought if we could record the appointment using software, then process it into a note for her, maybe we could get her home on time. I told her at the end of that day, December 29, 2019, "Give me a decade, and we’ll figure this out." Well, it wasn’t a decade; we figured it out in about three and a half years. Since then, we’ve helped thousands of veterinarians, completed over two million medical records, and I’d love to show you how it feels.

Christman: That’s fantastic! Congratulations on doing that.

Gallagher: Thank you!

Christman: So, we obviously have a fake dog here, and we’re going to do a simulation. What should we do first? Should we demonstrate the software or start with a physical exam?

Gallagher: Let’s do a physical exam. I’ve got Scribenote pulled up on the computer here and also on my phone. Scribenote is cloud-based, so whatever you do on your phone syncs automatically with your computer. For demonstration purposes, you’d walk into the exam room, ask your client for consent to record, click a button, and focus on your exam as usual.

Christman: We’re going to say this is Capone, and you’re the owner, Ryan. I understand Capone came in for shaking his ears, correct?

Gallagher: Yeah, he’s been itching and shaking his ears for the past two and a half weeks. He cries a little when he does it, and I’m getting worried.

Christman: Okay, let’s take a look. His gum color looks nice, pink, and moist. Capillary refill time is less than two seconds. There’s a bit of dental disease—grade one out of four. His eyes look good. For the purpose of this conversation, let’s jump to the ears. The right ear (AD) has mild ceruminous discharge, and the left ear (AS) looks like it has some brown ceruminous discharge as well. I’d want to get an ear cytology to check for bacteria and/or yeast. I’ll come back with the treatment plan so you can go home with medication, and I want to show you how to clean his ears.

Gallagher: That sounds great. I’m just worried because I need to take my kid to karate and there is a lot of karate practice these days. Is this going to take a long time?

Christman: No, it’s not going to take that long, Ryan. This will only take about five minutes or so to get those results back.

Gallagher: Okay. The kids have been wild since going back to school, but I appreciate it. One of the most common questions we get is, "Your exam room conversation isn’t like the dictation we just did, right?" That was for the sake of time—exam room conversations are unstructured. They include talk about kids, vacations, and other unrelated topics. When we pull up this record, hopefully as part of a live demo, you won’t see any of that. You’ll just see the relevant information for the patient.

In fact, you can see right here on the screen that the note in our inbox has already been processed. It’s done. We have a medical record for Capone, who presented with ear itching and head shaking. Looking at the record, we can see it’s been going on for about two and a half weeks. The patient has been crying when shaking his head. No other concerns were mentioned.

I won’t go through the entire objective, but what we see here is that Scribenote has automatically extracted key clinical information and put it where it belongs in the objective. It also calls out items that weren’t mentioned. Now, some people say, “I don’t want ‘not mentioned’ showing up throughout my exams.” That’s where customizable defaults come in. For example, if you want a default body condition score to show 4 out of 9 when it isn’t discussed, we can set that up. We call this feature custom objective defaults. If you say something like, “Looks good,” or, “Sounds normal,” it will default to your predefined normal values.

Christman: Great!

Gallagher: As we scroll through the rest of the exam, you’ll notice there’s no mention of karate, but we did pull out your assessment: bilateral otitis externa, mild dental disease graded 1 out of 4, and follow-up plans. This happens automatically. If you really want to test its capabilities, bring it into a 45-minute appointment where you discuss everything. You’ll still see only the relevant information surfaced at the end.

Christman: I’m smiling because this probably just saved me at least 15 minutes on one case—writing up notes, doing the rule-outs, and putting the plan in place. Look how organized it is with bulleted points, as well. So, how do we export this? Is there a drag-and-drop feature?

Gallagher: Yes, Scribenote makes it easy to export into your PIMS. While I don’t have a PIMS on this computer, the process is as simple as copy-paste. It takes about 10 seconds per record. What used to take 15 minutes now takes 1 minute to review and 10 seconds to transfer into your system.