Expert Q&A: Dr. Jared Pelo, ambient clinical pioneer
Microsoft Dragon Copilot, part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, provides an AI assistant for clinical workflow. It combines ambient conversation capture, natural language understanding, and advanced generative AI to streamline documentation, surface information, and automate tasks.
As the physician who first had the idea of ambient listening and automatic note creation for clinical documentation, Dr. Jared Pelo discusses how Dragon Copilot benefits providers and their patients.
How did you come up with the idea for ambient listening? And how has the technology evolved over the last 10 years?
Every physician has thought, “I shouldn’t have to write my own notes—computers should write my notes for me.” Coming up with the idea wasn’t the hard part; I knew we needed something different from dictation like enabling clinicians to just have a patient conversation and have the recording turned into a clinical note for them to review.
After finding it difficult to get the initial innovation off the ground in a hospital as a Medical Director, I realized I needed to set up a company to build this. Over the last decade, we’ve gone from utilizing medical scribes to ambient clinical intelligence for automatic note creation. And now, we have the addition of an AI copilot that can assist with so many of the mundane aspects of clinical workflow.
Besides automatic note creation, are there other things clinicians can use Dragon Copilot for?
Not only can Dragon Copilot streamline documentation but it can also automate tasks in other parts of the workflow such as ordering, writing referral letters, or creating after-visit summaries to name but a few.
On top of that, Dragon Copilot can surface medical information from trusted sources such as the CDC, Medline, CMS and the MSD Merck Manual and provide it to the physician at the point of care.
What impact does using Dragon Copilot have on clinicians?
The biggest impact is reducing the documentation burden and giving clinicians their lives back, so they don’t have those feelings of burnout or decide they need to leave the profession.
Every day, we hear stories from clinicians telling us how much Dragon Copilot has improved their work-life balance. If you're a physician who feels burned out and has lost hope, I want you to know two things. One: what you do matters every single day—it matters to the patients you serve. And two: we're building solutions that enable you to do your work during work hours and do it with more joy. There is hope for the future.
What’s the impact of Dragon Copilot on patients?
I think the most important benefit for patients when their clinician uses Dragon Copilot is the reduction in medical errors. We’ve seen many cases where a physician is reviewing a note and says, “The patient never told me they had cancer—why is that on the note?” Then they look at the transcript and see the patient mentioned it in passing, and that knowledge will drive the physician’s care for that patient.
What’s the future of AI in healthcare?
What I think is so exciting is that we’re only at the very beginning of this AI revolution, and these solutions will continue to advance and become better for us.
We’ll see a continued expansion of AI taking on more of the mundane, clerical work of medicine, so clinicians can connect with patients and provide great care. We’ll also see an increase in using AI tools for clinical decision support, providing clinical intelligence at the point of care and alerting physicians to things they might miss.
I think in a few years’ time it will be highly unusual not to have clinician-patient conversations recorded by AI, because we’ll learn that a human plus AI is better medicine. It’s safer, it guides us, it helps us not miss things, it helps us not make mistakes. I think we’re headed toward a time where every patient interaction is recorded by AI, if a patient opts into it, so that they receive better, safer care.
Right now, we're at the stage where it's like the internet in the early 1990’s, when it was really exciting for a small group of people. And now the internet is everywhere, and we can't imagine data not flowing freely and quickly. I think 20 years from now, it will be the same with AI—we won’t be able to imagine not having this intelligence helping us all the time.