Manny Krakaris, CEO of Augmedix, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how this technology is helping doctors fight burnout, the cloud wars over healthcare data, and what the future of telemedicine looks like.

Cheddar Innovates

Augmedix CEO on Cloud Wars Over Healthcare Data

Welcome back to cheddar innovates brought to you by curiosity stream. I'm Hannah post op check. Our next guest is bringing innovation to the healthcare industry by solving a $4.6 billion problem. Doctor burnout Aug medics is a virtual medical scribe that uses a combination of ai machine learning and natural language processing in doctor's offices, hospitals and so much more. So joining us now manny, Kocoras, ceo of ogg medics a pioneer in medical note documentation manny, how does this work breakdown how these doctors use this technology? Sure. It's actually quite simple Hannah um so we equip doctors with either smartphones or google glass um through which they access the service and what they do once they've accessed the, they've activated a connection to our platform. They go ahead and have a natural interaction conversation with their patients and we observe that interaction virtually via the smartphone or google glass. That information then passes through our platform, we convert the audio into text uh and then use that text with some natural language processing models that we built to generate the medical note and all of that is overseen by documentation specialist that we have situated in four countries around the world now, especially after the past couple of years that we've experienced, Why do you think this kind of technology is so needed right now? Well there's a chronic and acute shortage of medical personnel in the healthcare industry and uh it's been exacerbated by the pandemic and you juxtapose that against a growing and aging patient population. You've got a tremendous imbalance between the supply of medical care and the demand for it. Um so there has to be um solutions that have to be developed that relieves some of that strain and when we look at what's causing some of that imbalance, we realized that a third of the doctor's day is spent on administrative tasks like the medical note when they could instead be used to see patients. Uh So that's a lot of a lot of um um slippage or drainage out of the system. From a productivity perspective that doesn't need to be well. So how is machine learning and ai going to play a role in the healthcare industry in the future? You think well health care in general is becoming much more digitized. Um uh there's actual delivery of health care now via telemedicine, it's become much more prominent than it was pre pandemic. But if you look at all of the things that go through the process of you getting health care as a patient, a lot of the work is administrative. It has very little to do with delivery of actual patient care by a doctor and that work needs to be offloaded from the doctor too. Technology quite frankly. Well, so a lot of tech giants are making an entry into the space and we're seeing cloud wars over healthcare data. What does this competitive landscape look like to you? Well, it's interesting. So as you know, Microsoft acquired nuance communications um prominent company in our business. Um that transaction I think closed a couple of weeks ago, Uh they purchased them for about $20 billion. Then Oracle announced the acquisition of Cerner, Big EMR Company. Um And there's some other major acquisitions that have happened. We're about to happen. And what we're seeing is that the emergence of a cloud war, if you will from these by these tech giants and what they're, I think what they're trying to accomplish is not just feed their cloud infrastructure but get access to clinical data that they will then in turn mine and ultimately commercialized in some fashion. Uh We find ourselves in industry position because we're at the source point of that day to the point of care. Um so we kind of like what's happening out there um and we'll continue to do what we're doing in terms of generating the the data. And we've generated thus far over five million medical notes and we're adding to that at a rate of over 40,000 a week. Well we talked about this a little bit before, but we know that telemedicine has completely boomed since the pandemic. Is that something that you think is really gonna stick around? I think so yeah. Based on conversations I've had with leaders of our major customers um they have integrated telemedicine into their standard workflows. Um So pre pandemic Telemedicine visits might have accounted for maybe 2% of all patient visits um of our customers And today it's up to about 25 at the peak of the pandemic was much higher when people were reluctant to have in person visits with their doctors for safety reasons. But that reluctance has diminished over time. So people are beginning to go back and see doctors in person. But there's still a class of visits. The routine follow ups, for example, um or where a doctor then um conveys to you. What's the results of various lab tests where you don't really need to go in to see the doctor? And so that's where telemedicine has really shown in the marketplace. Well, manny, thank you so much for joining us today. I look forward to seeing what you'll do in the future. Thank you too, manny, crack era ceo of dog medics.