The Root of Sporo’s Conception

Throughout one of my clinical rotation experiences at Yale, I had the pleasure of working with  and learning from several clinicians in hematology/oncology specialist care practice. The tasks at hand were to gather critical patient information through patient interviews, clinical notes and chart review, and physical examinations. I would present these patients using the information I gathered to these attending physicians, and they would give me feedback on presentation flow, foci of findings, and further information that they required. 

Within each shift, I could only see about one patient per hour. 20 minutes were utilized in actually seeing my assigned patients (either alone or with the attending), 20 minutes were used reviewing the patient’s clinical notes, and the rest were on presenting to my attending. 33% of my time was essentially spent on Epic searching through hundreds of pages of documented information to extract key puzzle pieces of information scattered throughout, and it was up to me to put it all together so that I had a picture of my patient that I could use to tailor my examination. 

I found that this experience was not limited to my colleagues and I. The attending physicians also had a considerable disdain for EHR workflow, especially when receiving new patients. A new patient who had transferred from another tertiary care center had mountains of clinical notes for one of my attendings to go through, each in an unfamiliar format. I remember they had wished for a solution to this lack of efficient and effective communication in the transition-of-care between physicians when receiving new patients, as well as a solution for the time sink that is the general EHR workflow.

This story is not unique. 75% of physicians in the United States facing severe burnout cite EHRs as a main source,^[1] spending over half their time in an average workday on EHRs. 33% of their time on EHRs is used on chart review alone.^[2] Within this new age of AI in healthcare, it is no longer a fantasy nor even a lofty goal to incorporate new LLM technology into the standard clinical workflow, overcoming the challenges presented by unstandardized, poorly communicated EHR. 

And this is where Sporo comes in – presenting an attainable vision for the future of clinical workflow automation. 

[1] Tajirian T, Stergiopoulos V, Strudwick G, Sequeira L, Sanches M, Kemp J, Ramamoorthi K, Zhang T, Jankowicz D. The Influence of Electronic Health Record Use on Physician Burnout: Cross-Sectional Survey. J Med Internet Res. 2020 Jul 15;22(7):e19274. doi: 10.2196/19274. PMID: 32673234; PMCID: PMC7392132.

[2] Overhage JM, McCallie D Jr. Physician Time Spent Using the Electronic Health Record During Outpatient Encounters: A Descriptive Study. Ann Intern Med. 2020 Feb 4;172(3):169-174. doi: 10.7326/M18-3684. Epub 2020 Jan 14. Erratum in: Ann Intern Med. 2020 Oct 6;173(7):596. PMID: 31931523.