Clinicians spend large amounts of time on clinical documentation, and inefficiencies impact quality of care and increase clinician burnout. Despite the promise of electronic medical records (EMR), the transition from paper-based records has been negatively associated with clinician wellness, in part due to poor user experience, increased burden of documentation, and alert fatigue. In this study, we present Almanac Copilot, an autonomous agent capable of assisting clinicians with EMR-specific tasks such as information retrieval and order placement. On EHR-QA, a synthetic evaluation dataset of 300 common EHR queries based on real patient data, Almanac Copilot obtains a successful task completion rate of 74% (n = 221 tasks) with a mean score of 2.45 over 3 (95% CI:2.34-2.56). By automating routine tasks and streamlining the documentation process, our findings highlight the significant potential of autonomous agents to mitigate the cognitive load imposed on clinicians by current EMR systems.
@article{arxiv.2405.07896,
title = {Almanac Copilot: Towards Autonomous Electronic Health Record Navigation},
author = {Cyril Zakka and Joseph Cho and Gracia Fahed and Rohan Shad and Michael Moor and Robyn Fong and Dhamanpreet Kaur and Vishnu Ravi and Oliver Aalami and Roxana Daneshjou and Akshay Chaudhari and William Hiesinger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.07896},
year = {2024}
}