Saykara Launches Healthcare Voice Assistant

Saykara has launched a fully ambient and fully autonomous voice assistant technology for healthcare. The new product is an artificially intelligent exam room voice assistant that seamlessly listens to physician-patient conversations without voice commands, captures conversation meaning and documents encounters in real time.

Saykara's ability to extract and document meaning from conversations in real time is underpinned by technology that enables discretization, transforming conversational content into discrete data points that can then be queried and open to analysis. This process allows Saykara to do the following:

• Summarize and Synthesize: In listening in on a full physician-patient conversation, Saykara aims to create a summary that provides healthcare providers with a human representation of what was discussed. For an exam conversation related to shoulder pain, Saykara might focus on what it determines (discretizes) to be the 200 most salient points that were stated. These points of fact then help create a human, readable SOAP note (subjective, objective, assessment, and plan).
• Learn and Recognize Patterns: Discretization allows Saykara to establish patterns across types of physician-patient encounters. In the instance of the shoulder pain exam, Saykara can identify patterns unique to acute shoulder pain from a bike injury or patterns unique to chronic shoulder pain from repetitive strain. Saykara refers to patterns specific to a kind of physician-patient as Encounter Pathways.

Taken holistically, Saykara's approach to conversational voice AI for doctors is a stepping stone to AI eventually serving as a broader, augmentative technology for doctors across any medical specialty. At launch, Saykara's real-time autonomous interpretation technology (no back-end human review) is available for select Encounter Pathways in Orthopedics.

"Saykara has been built on the core belief that conversational AI can not only solve physician burnout and improve job satisfaction, but that it is the single most important foundational technology for healthcare in the next decade," said Harjinder Sandhu, CEO of Saykara, in a statement. "Up until now, AI has made an impact with access to medical imaging, lab results and patient history. Now we're at AI's next frontier in medicine. Much like autonomous cars learned from shadowing human drivers, Kara is shadowing doctors and learning from the incredibly rich data available from exam room conversations. AI can now navigate certain patient visits "hands-free," and we are well on our way to making this the new normal."

"To a large degree, the day-to-day practice of modern medicine has been hijacked by electronic documentation that serves billing. I didn't get into medicine to spend hours of my day doing data entry on a computer," said Matt Fradkin, MD, a pediatrician at Providence St. Joseph Health, in a statement. "As an early adopter of Saykara, I saw an immediate reduction in my charting time, meaning I was able to spend more time at home with my family, more time with patients, and more time on all of the parts of medicine that bring me joy. Over the past two years, I've seen Kara get faster and better, with almost no delay between a patient encounter and clinic note. I'm looking forward to the efficiency improvements a fully autonomous system can introduce into my day to day."

Saykara's launch of its fully autonomous offering follows its introduction of a fully ambient healthcare voice assistant in 2019. Saykara currently serves 18 healthcare specialties, including primary care, pediatrics, internal medicine, orthopedics, urology and more, and has onboarded 25 healthcare organizations. Customers include Providence St. Joseph Hospital, Swedish Medical Group, Providence Kadlec, Hancock Hospital, MultiCare Health System, and OrthoIndy Hospital, among others.