German Company Develops AI, LLM Program to Generate “Doctor’s Letters”

German Company Develops AI, LLM Program to Generate “Doctor’s Letters”

Rohit Mahajan

Researchers in Germany have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to create an app to expedite the creation of doctor’s letters and hospital discharge papers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are one of the most exciting recent developments in AI. These LLMs have the ability to generate human-like text and have opened up a new world of possibilities for natural language processing and other associated applications across all industries and at almost every touchpoint where we interact with AI.

Simply put, Large Language Models are incredibly smart computer programs that have been trained with enormous amounts of human-generated text from all available internet sources, as well as direct input by their developers. This training helps LLMs understand human language extremely well and generate quite meaningful and relevant responses in very human-like speech.

LLMs and generative AI are being seen as game changers when it comes to AI adoption in many industries. They are having a particular impact in healthcare, where LLMs are being leveraged to assist doctors, researchers, and patients.

Here's a recent example.

In Germany, the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) recently developed a “doctor’s letter generator” application. This tool utilizes a combination of algorithms and artificial intelligence for Natural Language Processing (NLP) to expedite the creation of doctor’s letters.

“Doctor’s letters” contain discharge information and post-treatment instructions after a patient is released from a hospital. The Fraunhofer Institute estimates that Germany alone generates approximately 150 million doctor’s letters annually, taking up valuable time that could be used elsewhere.

The AI-LLM system was trained on a German dataset of over 12,000 anonymous doctor’s letters. Initial tests have shown that the AI-generated letters are of comparable quality to those written by humans, presenting possibilities for automating clinical correspondence.

How AI and LLMs Can Improve Hospital Operations

The healthcare sector faces various challenges, including staff shortages, cost pressures, and information overload due to the increasing amount of data. Hospital data is often manually analyzed, which consumes valuable time and can lead to missing key information and incomplete accounting. The use of LLMs, such as ChatGPT, has shown significant development, enabling the processing of images, tabular data, as well as texts and spoken language. This opens up entirely new opportunities in the medical sector for improving patient treatment processes while ensuring data protection.

To address these challenges, the Healthcare Analytics Team at Fraunhofer IAIS is collaborating with medical professionals to develop solutions for information extraction from documents. Their objective is to launch the doctor’s letter generator by the end of 2024, simplifying the creation of discharge letters. The AI application analyzes existing documents and generates a natural-sounding text with patient explanations. After necessary checks and possible adjustments, doctors can send the letter with a click of a button in a fraction of the time it takes to create it manually. This not only saves time for healthcare professionals but also allows patients to leave the hospital more quickly.

Additionally, the AI-powered system reduces the workload for medical staff by automatically aggregating critical information from a patient's medical records and presenting it in a clear, structured format. This automation streamlines processes ensures efficient access to information, and enhances data security.

How BigRio Helps Bring Advanced AI Solutions to Healthcare

The IAIS research into generative AI and LLMs and how they can be used to improve healthcare is one of the emerging and most promising areas of the use of AI in medicine.

BigRio has always been at the forefront of innovation with being a developer and technology implementation partner for such advances in leveraging AI to improve healthcare delivery, originally in the field of diagnostics and research. We have recently been focusing our efforts on supporting Digital Health companies that are using LLMs and GAI to improve those areas of healthcare as well as in direct patient interactions, as in the case of the German researchers.

In fact, we have launched an AI Studio specifically for US-based Healthcare startups with AI/GAI centricity. Our mission is to help AI startups scale and gear up to stay one step ahead of the pack and emerge as winners in their respective domains.

AI Startups face numerous challenges when it comes to demonstrating their value proposition, particularly when it comes to advanced AI solutions for pharma and healthcare. We have taken an award-winning and unique approach to incubating and facilitating startups that allow the R&D team and stakeholders to efficiently collaborate and craft the process to best suit actual ongoing needs, which leads to a faster, more accurate output.

We provide:

• Access to a top-level talent pool, including business executives, developers, data scientists, and data engineers.
• Assistance in the development and testing of the MVP, Prototypes, and POCs.
• Professional services for implementation and support of Pilot projects
• Sales and Marketing support and potential client introductions.
• Access to private capital sources.

BigRio excels in overcoming such initial hurdles, which present nearly insurmountable obstacles to a startup operation.

You can read much more about how AI is redefining healthcare delivery and drug discovery in my new book Quantum Care: A Deep Dive into AI for Health Delivery and Research . It’s a comprehensive look at how AI and machine learning are being used to improve healthcare delivery at every touchpoint.

Rohit Mahajan is a Managing Partner with BigRio. He has a particular expertise in the development and design of innovative solutions for clients in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, and other industry segments.

BigRio is a technology consulting firm?empowering data to drive innovation and advanced AI. We specialize in cutting-edge Big Data, Machine Learning, and Custom Software strategy, analysis, architecture, and implementation solutions.?If you would like to benefit from our expertise in these areas or if you have further questions on the content of this article, please do not hesitate to?contact us .