Some tech giants –i ncluding Microsoft and Amazon – have raced to grab a share of the £21bn AI healthcare market, where investment in some facets has doubled since last year
Investment in artificial intelligence medical note-taking apps doubled last year (2024).
Hospitals and physicians across the NHS are trialling it as a way to save time and improve doctor-patient interactions. Tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon have raced to grab a share of the £21bn AI healthcare market. Companies focused on creating digital scribes for medics raised £644m in funding in 2024 compared to £314m the year before (2023), according to data analyst PitchBook.
Along with big tech, start-ups such as Nabla, Heidi, Corti and Tortus also landed cash to develop apps. Microsoft, which owns AI speech recognition company Nuance, as well as Amazon and Oracle, have launched AI co-pilots for physicians.
They use large language models and speech recognition to auto-generate transcripts of patient visits, highlight medical details and create clinical summaries. South London primary care physician Harpreet Sood (corr), who has trialled Nabla’s app for 15 months, said: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more transformative in 15 years of healthcare than this. It’s remarkable.’’
The former adviser on tech and innovation to NHS England said handwritten note-taking could take two hours in a 40-patient clinic.
AI shaved up to four minutes off every 10-minute consultation.
While Harpreet checks over every report the app generates the strain of simultaneously writing and listening during a consultation is hugely “minimised if not totally removed”.
“You can focus more on the patient, listen, be more present, understand their body language. I’ve enjoyed my consultations more now,” he said. “I wouldn’t rely solely on the tool. I would read every note to check and go back to the transcript. There is work to be done there. But for me personally it has been a big shift.’’
At Stanford University School Medicine in California two-thirds of around 50 primary care physicians who trialled Nuance’s AI-powered note-taker last year said it saved time – though 90% said manual editing was needed to correct inaccuracies.
According to studies medics spend one-third of their workday on paperwork. Nuance said its tool cuts that time in half. But researchers have warned of the dangers of AI-generated fabrications known as `hallucinations’ which could be particularly harmful in medicine.
US university boffins who analysed thousands of AI-generated voice transcriptions from 2023 found 1% contained “entire hallucinated phrases or sentences which did not exist in any form in the underlying audio”. Around 40% of hallucinations included harmful made-up content, the study said.
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