Choosing a Medical AI Scribe in Canada
Yes, DAX Copilot is Coming to Canada Soon
First things first!
Microsoft’s DAX Copilot is hopefully set to arrive in Canada Q2 of 2025. We know that many of you have been waiting and some of you have been scouting out or adopting other AI solutions. We understand. That said, please take some time to read this article — if nothing else, just the summary at the bottom. Thank you.
To answer the questions you will have right out of the gate:
- Pricing is not yet finalized and we will send out an email the moment we have that information from Microsoft.
- You will need Dragon Medical One to use DAX Copilot — the technologies work hand in hand. It is not yet known if the subscriptions will be combined into one or separate.
- DAX Copilot’s accuracy and ability for customization is phenomenal. We can’t wait to assist those interested in adopting Medical AI into their practice.
Introduction
In the last few years, numerous AI medical scribes have appeared on the global market. As with all products, these solutions are not created equal. And as always – it is the right tool for the right job for the specific practitioner and their personal needs and workflow.
Speakeasy Solutions has been providing medical speech recognition solutions across Canada for 25 years. We have witnessed incredible growth in this industry and AI is certainly the new rousing topic for discussion and use in the medical field. These are truly exciting times. That said, we also recognize that each person in the medical field and their needs is unique. Just like speech recognition use and EMRs/EHRs, one size does not fit all.
At the end of the day, medical practitioners want to practice medicine and care for their patients to the best of their ability with their resources on hand. Administrative tasks, including choosing which technologies to incorporate in their practice, often takes a backseat – understandably so. There are only so many hours in a day.
It is our hope that the following guide assists medical practitioners in Canada choose the best AI solution for them. While Speakeasy Solutions provides Dragon Medical One and very soon, DAX Copilot, within Canada, we know that some individuals may explore other avenues. Regardless of your decision, self-education on the topic of medical AI solutions is important for you, your clinic, and your patients.
If, after reading this, you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out by telephone (1-888-964-9109) or email [email protected]. Canadian healthcare professionals only, as we do not provide Dragon Medical One or DAX Copilot in the United States. Thank you for your kind understanding.
NOTE: If you wish only a summary, please scroll down to the bottom of this article.
Expertise
History
While startups and newly formed companies have a lot of energy, they may not have the longevity and resources that will carry them through the future and forthcoming advancements.
Ask the AI vendor:
- How long have they been in business?
- How many people do they employ?
DAX Copilot:
DAX Copilot combines over 25 years of Nuance’s medical vocabulary and voice modelling PLUS, since 2008, a dedicated R&D organization, the Microsoft Azure AI team.
Speakeasy Solutions has been providing Dragon Medical solutions across Canada for 25 years.
Usage
Medical AI scribe vendors should have experience providing services for the type of medicine you practice, your EMR/EHR, as well as the size of your organization (from a single physician practice to a multinational clinic).
Ask the AI vendor:
- Who are their customers; specifically, which fields do the healthcare professionals practice?
- How many customers do they have, and what size are the organizations they have successfully deployed their AI solution?
DAX Copilot:
The first version of DAX launched in 2020, with DAX Copilot having launched in 2023. It is currently used by 550K Dragon users at hundreds of healthcare organizations within all types and sizes of primary care and urgent care facilities.
References
Always obtain references, customers’ stories, and even documented papers with respect to the efficacy of the AI solution.
Ask the AI vendor:
Who can be contacted to discuss the AI solution provided?
What supporting documentation is available, substantiating quantified outcomes and ROI?
DAX Copilot:
In the United States (DAX Copilot will not be available in Canada until early-ish 2025), Atrium Health, Stanford Health Care, and Valley View Hospital have cited that DAX Copilot has improved the quality of patient care and documentation.
70% of practitioners say DAX Copilot improves works-life balance. 77% say DAX Copilot improves the quality of documentation. 93% of patients say that the physician is more engaged in their healthcare, and 90% say that they are physician spends less time on the computer in the exam room with them.
Technology
Product Offering
While an EMR/EHR may have integrated speech recognition or AI, the technology may not satisfy the needs of all physicians. Over the years, many of Speakeasy Solutions’ customers have had very stringent requirements for their documentation in terms of accuracy and have adopted Dragon Medical in lieu of the speech recognition and/or AI built into their chosen EMR/EHR for the increased productivity and accuracy that Dragon Medical provides. Always try the different solutions available to discover which one best suit your needs.
While an ambient scribe is helpful, many physicians augment their notes with real-time dictation, increasing the quality of their documentation and thusly the care for their patients. Additionally, the ability to create custom commands for the purpose of increasing productivity has the capacity to save considerable time with repetitious tasks.
Ask the AI vendor:
- Is front-end speech recognition available?
- What types of efficiency macros or voice commands can be created?
DAX Copilot:
Dragon Medical One, with real-time speech recognition and voice commands, is integrated with DAX Copilot. Adding an additional note to a patient’s record is quick and easy. Creating voice commands to log you into a medical reference site such as UpToDate, navigate your EMR/EHR, and perform any repetitious time-consuming tasks is extraordinarily efficient.
AI Model
The core of a medical AI impacts accuracy and reliability more than anything else. If an AI’s language model is based on a narrow source of data (small amount of clinical data, general publicly available data, and so on) it is unlikely to serve the medical practitioner effectively.
Ask the AI vendor:
- Are they using an off-the-shelf large language model?
- What is the source and type of data used in their AI solution?
- How will the physician’s resulting data be used and where?
DAX Copilot:
Award-winning conversational and ambient AI trained on 1 billion+ minutes of medical dictation annually and 15 million+ ambient encounters plus an optimized large language model is the core of DAX Copilot. This data is verified for accuracy and does not find its way into publicly available AI models.
Responsible AI
You will hear the phrase “responsible AI” a lot. Patient safety and thereby practitioner reputation are paramount in the healthcare industry. It is possible for AI to produce incorrect results. As such, it is imperative for the AI vendor to employ a team of responsible AI experts to mitigate potential bias and risk.
Ask the AI vendor:
- How is the accuracy of the AI evaluated?
- What is the process for reviewing changes necessary to minimize harm?
- How many people are involved in examining physician feedback regarding accuracy?
DAX Copilot:
Microsoft utilizes an Office of Responsible AI, guiding AI development and use based on 6 principles –
1. Fairness: AI systems should treat all people fairly.
2. Reliability and safety: AI systems should perform reliably and safely.
3. Privacy and security: AI systems should be secure and respect privacy.
4. Inclusiveness: AI systems should empower everyone and engage people.
5. Transparency: AI systems should be understandable.
6. Accountability: People should be accountable for AI systems.
Accuracy and Speed
Documentation accuracy and turnaround time is vital in a physician’s practice. Each inaccuracy in a resulting note increases editing and does not save the practitioner time. Further, inaccuracies that are missed can have negative consequences for both the patient and the physician.
Ask the AI vendor:
- How accurate are the resulting notes in the physician’s particular field?
- How quickly is the note produced after the end of the physician-patient encounter?
- What size is the R&D team working on continual accuracy improvements?
DAX Copilot:
Trained on over 15 million clinical encounters, DAX Copilot’s language model is based on over 2 decades of data and experience in optimizing medical speech technology. The AI model is continuously trained and optimized.
Note turnaround time is consistently quick, depending on the length of the encounter.
Microsoft’s 600+ person R&D team is solely focused on improving the accuracy and development of DAX Copilot.
Ease-Of-Use
The easier something is to use, the more likely we are to adopt it and the more satisfied we feel. If incorporating a technology does not happen quick enough, it is abandoned. It is therefore important for resulting notes to be easy to edit and preferences possible through customization.
Ask the AI vendor:
- How can notes be edited after creation by the AI?
- Can the notes be customized to the physician’s preferences?
DAX Copilot:
Once DAX Copilot produces a note, it can be further edited with Dragon Medical One using real-time speech recognition. Words and phrases can be added and removed quickly and easily.
The resulting note can be formatted as a clinical summary, a narrative, or bulleted format. The content can also be reordered and even searched by voice.
Reliability and Security
The security of patient data is vital in the healthcare industry. AI solutions are processed on servers in the cloud. Those servers need to be available to the medical professional and secure. And most importantly for Canadian healthcare professionals, the servers must be situated in Canada where no information or data leaves the country.
Ask the AI vendor:
- Where are the servers located?
- What security protocols are in place?
- What security certifications have they achieved?
DAX Copilot:
DAX Copilot is retained on the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare in Canada, providing best in class security and extensive healthcare industry compliance coverage with over 100 compliance offerings.
Microsoft launched the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) in order to combat the increasing prevalence of cyber attacks and protect the data on its servers.
DAX Copilot has the following certifications:
- HITRUST CSF Azure and Trust Center
- AICPA SOC 2
- ISO 27001
- HIPPA
Support
Implementation and Ongoing Support
The success of deploying any technology solution hinges on the knowledge and dedication of the provider. Once deployed, ongoing assistance must be accessible.
Ask the AI vendor:
- Who provides both implementation and ongoing support?
- What method is used to contact support?
DAX Copilot:
Dedicated and trained value-added resellers provide onboarding and support services for DAX Copilot.
Speakeasy Solutions is passionate about speech technologies for medical documentation. We have observed the changes in medical offices for over two decades and the additional responsibilities put upon physicians. Spending less time on documentation and more time on patients and the doctor’s personal life is more important than ever. Speech technologies can offer this respite and we are here to help.
Training
Customized and knowledgeable training for physicians, considering their chosen EMR/EHR and preferred workflow, provides the lifeline that medical practitioners need to be successful.
Ask the AI vendor:
- How are practitioners trained?
- How are training sessions conducted?
DAX Copilot:
Speakeasy Solutions prides itself on adaptive training that is personalized for each physician. We work with medical professionals in all fields and have experience with most Canadian EMR/EHRs.
For brief questions, Speakeasy Solutions encourages customers to phone or send an email. For a list of questions, booking an appointment (often available within the next 24 hours) ensures that our customers have our complete attention and focus.
Closing Thoughts on the Use of AI
What follows are my (Alexandria Carstens of Speakeasy Solutions) personal thoughts.
As with EMR/EHRs and speech recognition, medical AI is not effective for everyone or every scenario. I firmly believe in “the right tool for the right job”. Providing medical speech recognition solutions across Canada for the last 25 years has given me more insight into medical practitioners and their practices than I ever thought possible. The clinical landscape has also changed dramatically in the last few decades and will continue to do so.
I have spoken with physicians, mostly with a mental health practice, who are opposed to the use of AI for their consultations. They feel that their reports have far more merit if written in their voice. I can understand this and respect this stance. For the moment, speech recognition alone suits their purposes. On the flipside, there are those physicians who are eager to embrace AI and the benefits that this technology will bring to their office.
Canada is somewhat unique and blessed in that a considerable percentage of our population are from all over the world. Some medical practitioners have very pronounced accents which, once upon a time, produced poor results with speech recognition. In time, Dragon Medical advanced to adapt to many accents, resulting in the very high speech recognition accuracy that we see today (and is reflected in DAX Copilot). The same will need to take place with AI. Where AI is today is not where it will be even a year from now – especially with Microsoft’s R&D spearheading DAX Copilot. The benefits of AI in the healthcare industry are just beginning.
If you are a customer of Speakeasy Solutions, you know that I don’t consider myself a “salesperson” per se but someone who feels passionately about speech technology and who offers you tools enabling you to work more efficiently, increasing patient care and consequently able to spend more time with patients and with your loved ones. I look forward to sharing Microsoft’s DAX Copilot, and Dragon Medical One for those who are not using it yet, with you in the very near future.
Choosing a Medical AI Scribe in Canada Summary
A healthcare practitioner’s focus is providing their patients with the best care possible. Additionally, a physician needs to care for themselves and their practice. For many practitioners, as speech recognition can be a tremendous benefit, so can an AI scribe. Choosing the right AI scribe benefits patients and the physician.
As a Canadian healthcare professional, consider the following for the AI scribe you choose:
- All data is hosted on servers within Canada.
- Reliable servers with the highest security protocols in place alongside internationally acknowledged certifications (HITRUST).
- The medical AI vendor has a proven track record in the industry spanning more than a few years.
- The AI’s language model is based on millions of medical notes, spanning the breadth of all medical fields.
- The AI’s output is near perfect in accuracy if not perfect.
- The AI solution is capable of real-time speech recognition for note augmentation.
- A continually updated AI solution (several times per year) based on feedback from a large pool of medical healthcare professionals.
- The AI solution is supported by highly knowledgeable individuals that are available when you need them (or at the very least, within 24 hours).
Again, if you have any questions or would simply like to discuss the benefits of AI in your practice, contact Speakeasy Solutions at 1-888-964-9109 or email [email protected].