AAFP Innovation Lab
The family medicine experience is based on a deeply personal physician-patient interaction that requires support from technology. But many technologies used in practice today have eroded the experience rather than enhancing it.
What We Believe
- Family physicians must primarily care.
- Information technology (IT) must work for us, not against us.
- We will no longer accept the status quo.
The AAFP Innovation Laboratory partners with industry to drive innovation with the latest proven technologies to optimize the family medicine experience. This includes cloud, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning, and voice and mobile technologies.
We are striving to identify innovative tools that decrease administrative burdens that stifle your joy of practice and contribute to the physician well-being crisis. Telehealth and value-based care tools are also being explored.
Our Goals
- Eliminate or decrease burnout
- Decrease health IT-related stress
- Provide more control of clinical time, where technology becomes responsive
Take Back Your Time
Administrative tasks steal clinical time and contribute to burnout. The AAFP offers resources to help you take back that time and safeguard your well-being.
Three Reasons to Participate
1. Reduce Your Administrative Tasks
Members and practice peers can participate in labs to trial existing and emerging technologies of interest to simplify administrative tasks.
2. Gain Free Experience with Innovative Solutions
Participating in a lab enables a practice to receive a hands-on trial of an innovative solution that would otherwise typically involve a binding commitment and costs.
3. Seize the Opportunity to Benefit Your Practice, Peers, Patients, and Family Medicine
Your insights on installing and using the tool have the potential to benefit you, your peers, and family medicine. Your feedback helps us better understand how the tools are working in various practices, with different patient populations and varying contexts. Feedback also helps to identify recommendations and best practices for successfully implementing a particular category of tools.
Suki Lab: AI Assistant for Documentation
Suki is a digital assistant for physicians that combines AI and voice-enabled technology. Suki understands natural language and completes tasks such as note creation and retrieving information from the EHR.
It is possible to use Suki as a standalone solution whereby Suki generates notes in PDF format that can then be saved in your EHR. Although the benefits may not be the same as those seen in the phase one pilot, members reported significant improvements using this nonintegrated workflow. The Suki lab launched in 2019 and has achieved several milestones.
Phase One
- The product achieved proof of concept with a cohort of 10 family physicians using the same type of EHR system (Athena) in a variety of practice settings.
- Phase one achieved dramatic and promising results, with 100 percent of physician users experiencing time savings and a dramatic increase in satisfaction with notes completion, efficiency and EHR use for other administrative tasks. Several physicians described the impact of being able to see patients and complete documentation without feeling rushed or having to work after hours as a “breakthrough” in their practices. See results and analysis in the Suki phase one white paper.
Phase Two
- Phase two examined the product category of AI assistant for documentation. This second lab validated the adoptability of an AI assistant for documentation across family medicine.
- Results show that an AI assistant for documentation can significantly reduce (by 72%) physician time spent on documentation. The lab participants also reported improvements in workload and practice satisfaction.
Navina is an AI-driven platform that integrates with your practice's EHR and automates aggregation and analysis of patients' data in real time. The goal is optimizing diagnosis and coding processes and enhancing clinical workflow.
Navina’s signature product integrates multiple types of patient data from diverse sources (tabular, numerical, time-series, images and text) in real time and restructures it into intuitive, actionable summaries called “Patient Portraits.” Navina ensures what's most important is immediately clear, diagnostically linked and contextually surfaced, based on the entirety and complexity of each patient’s data and history.
Phase One
Navina’s point-of-care model has allowed family physicians and colleagues to access and analyze patients’ data in real time to optimize diagnosis and ICD coding processes. This has helped identify all pertinent diagnoses, enabling users to provide appropriate care. It has also helped physicians increase risk-adjustment factor scores to accurately code diagnoses for proper payment.
"Family physicians who have used Navina have seen value in its ability to save time and identify issues that need to be addressed," said Steven Waldren, MD, MS, AAFP vice president and chief medical informatics officer and founder of the AAFP Innovation Lab.
Phase Two
This report describes physicians’ perspectives on using an artificial intelligence assistant designed to reduce the burden of clinical review, expand the use of patient information and improve documentation to meet the requirements for risk adjustment in value-based payment models.
Key performance metrics showed that physicians reviewed the AI assistant's patient summary in 85% of their visits, addressed the assistant's recommendation 87% of the time and accepted those recommendations 84% of the time.