V-EVA with Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal and Dan Albert

VFH Episode #11

In this episode, Teri welcomes both Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal and Dan Albert, from Vanderbilt University, to speak about their voice-first EHR Voice Assistant, V-EVA (Vanderbilt EHR Voice Assistant).

Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal is a pediatric endocrinologist, biomedical informatacist, and assistant professor at Vanderbilt University.

Dan Albert is the Associate Director of Health IT product development at Vanderbilt. He does custom software and service development.

Together they are creating V-EVA, Vanderbilt EHR Voice Assistant, a service that allows health providers to access relevant information in a medical chart through voice.

Key points about V-EVA!

The initial phase in developing V-EVA was to examine speech to text and NLP (natural language processing) tools that were available and then establish a partnership with Nuance to help with the voice interface (Nuance is HIPAA compliant).
The second phase was to develop the interaction with the EHR.
V-EVA is being built to work with the EPIC EHR; eventually the plan is for V-EVA to be EHR agnostic.
Using V-EVA, a health care provider can access pertinent information about a patient (e.g height, last lab result) in the context of the current patient interaction.
The goal is to make the information from V-EVA as concise and useful as possible. e.g. A clinician would not only want to know the weight of a patient, but also the context of that information – is the patient gaining weight? Losing weight? Is it a normal weight?
The first iteration of V-EVA is designed to obtain info from the chart; future plans are to add functions to write orders and control patient care tasks.
The biggest impact of V-EVA for Dr. Kumah-Crystal is having patient information summarized back in a way that is natural and convenient, allowing for more multitasking and a more satisfying patient experience (i.e. the technology allows the healthcare provider to be free from a screen to allow more time and energy to be focused on the patient).
Patient feedback has been very positive.