Penn Medicine makes patient care easier with ChatGPT-like tool for medical records

The issue: Prior to meeting with a patient, clinicians may need to spend up to 45 minutes digging through electronic health records (EHR) to find out why the patient needs to be seen and what prior tests have been done.

The idea: There is so much data in the EHR to sift through, so a tool with functions like ChatGPT would be useful to summarize the notes and pose questions to. However, clinicians need a safe and secure way to use AI that can also integrate into the workflow.

The solution: Chart Hero. This AI chat tool can summarize notes or PDFs, provide context for why the patient needs to be seen, and prep the information that clinicians need to take the best care of their patients.

Who CHIBE talked to about this:

• Dr. Srinath Adusumalli, Vice President and Chief Health Information Officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) and Informatics, Adjunct Professor of Healthcare Management at PSOM and Wharton, and CHIBE Internal Advisory board member
• Dr. Yevgeniy (Eugene) Gitelman, Head of Custom Software at the Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation, a hospitalist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer for Custom Solutions at Penn Medicine

Behavioral economics element to Chart Hero: Chart Hero reduces the friction providers have using and finding the information they need from the EHR.

Time saved: Instead of up to 45 minutes of review, clinicians can prompt Chart Hero to give them the information they need and receive it within 10 seconds or so.

“The beauty what Eugene and the team have built in Chart Hero is that I can write a prompt that approximates all of the hundreds of clicks I would need to otherwise do to tell me the information I need to know,” said Dr. Adusumalli.

Better formatting: “The notes are lengthy, and it takes a while to find the right notes and to synthesize and summarize and distill those into the way that people like,” said Dr. Gitelman. “Some people want a table, some people want a bulleted list, some people want prose. That’s one of the benefits of this model is that you can just say what format you want the information in.”

Examples of questions or prompts clinicians might ask: What is the patient’s anticoagulation history? Why are they on this blood thinner? What is this patient’s oncology history?

Bonus: “The information that we’re gaining from this is additive to what we might have otherwise picked up from human review, and it might even be changing — in some cases —  the management of patients, which is also huge because we know, as humans, there’s a lot of information on any given day that we may miss,” Dr. Gitelman said.

Number of users: Around 100 clinicians in several departments now have access to Chart Hero across inpatient and outpatient settings. Drs. Gitelman and Adusumalli said the tool is being gradually scaled to monitor it for safety and accuracy, and the team is soliciting feedback to make it the best experience for new users.

Research applications for Chart Hero: The team has started using Chart Hero to evaluate patients against complicated clinical trial criteria. 

“For example, a trial may have 30 inclusion and exclusion criteria, many of which are only located in free text,” Dr. Gitelman said. “We can create prompts to evaluate those criteria against information in the patient’s chart to speed up review by our clinical trial screeners.  For example, checking if patient has had prior treatments, what their functional status is, specific pathological diagnoses – all of this can be compared in a prompt to the notes and data in a chart.”

Expansion to patients: The team is also exploring partnerships that could help create an equivalent technology for patients to use to summarize their medical history and frame the information in a way that designates areas of certainty and uncertainty and suggests follow-up questions.  

Chart Hero creators: This tool was created through the Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation at Penn Medicine in partnership with the Penn Medicine Data and Technology Solutions team and clinical leaders in the health system.

Learn more about Chart Hero on the Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation website.