Research led by Dr. Brian Patterson, associate professor of emergency medicine, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, shows that the volume of electronic medical notes per patient available to emergency medicine providers has grown 30-fold over a 17-year period between 2006 and 2023 since the implementation of the electronic health record at a large health system (20
Today, one in five patients arriving at the emergency department had a chart the size of “Moby Dick” – a whale of a book at 600-odd pages and over 200,000 words.
“The study tells a dramatic story of providers adrift on an ocean of notes within electronic health records,” said Patterson.
While information in electronic health record notes improves patient care, researchers explained that clinicians need better ways to synthesize the data or risk missing critical information.
Artificial intelligence large language models that can analyze charts may help providers navigate this expanding body of data, according to Frank Liao, senior director of digital health and emerging technologies at UW Health, and a co-author of the study.
“These large language models can be trained to generate concise and relevant summaries of patient data, allowing physicians to quickly grasp essential information without sifting through extensive notes, potentially reducing the cognitive load on the physician,” he said.
One limitation is the current constraints on the number of tokens that can be analyzed. For example, when this study was published, GPT-4 Turbo had an upper limit of 128,000 tokens while the median size of electronic health record notes for a patient aged 65 or older contains almost 139,000 tokens.
Other members of the UW research team include Daniel Hekman, Frank Liao, Dr. Azita Hamedani, Dr. Manish Shah and Dr. Majid Afshar, Department of Medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
This article was adapted from a release by UW Health on August 8, 2024.