Freed.AI

Subjective:

You may have seen the Facebook or Instagram ad that features a man passed out on a log in the woods with the enticing words of “want to avoid burn out?”

Or perhaps this one?

Straight from my Instagram feed.

Needless to say, I clicked on it. ‘Cuz that’s what you do for your colleagues!

I’m doing this for SCIENCE — let’s go!

Objective (what the product actually is):

Freed.AI - the AI medical scribe that listens to your patient encounter and turns it into a full-on SOAP note.

Let’s take Freed for a spin through an actual patient encounter I had a few weeks ago.

Chief complaint? An ankle sprain.

After logging in, here is the main screen on my html browser (Google Chrome):

Very simple and clean UI. Before you begin a patient encounter, you click the “Capture Conversation” button and Freed will begin recording the conversation. Once you’re finished, hit “End Visit,” and the magical AI elves will begin to process the conversation.

Here’s what was interpreted from the conversation. Freed did a great job summarizing the conversation. Notice it did include a bit of information irrelevant to our medical encounter in the last sentence.

Let’s see what happens if you want to make it more concise…

More concise indeed! Let’s see what it gathered for our objective section:

I basically called out my physical examination findings like I had an actual scribe there with me in the room and it captured everything almost verbatim. Grammar/phrasing could be improved but the content would be something I expect an actual human medical scribe would type as a first draft.

That bit about the diagnostic test results was automatically generated from the conversation and not something I mentioned.

Looks like it captured the gist of what I said in an A&P form and generated the problems.

There’s even a Patient Instructions section that summarizes everything into a letter format with clear directions you could print out for your patient at the end of the visit.

Assessment (my thoughts):
The one-liner:

"A simple but effective, time-saving AI scribing assistant for your patient encounters."

Freed.AI delivers on the promise of summarizing your patient encounters. They really do offer a great product that can serve as an alternative to current telemedical scribes. While you can’t make on-the-fly adjustments as you would with an actual human assistant, I’d wager this product gets us to 80% of what a human medical scribe can do for you in simple encounters. Although there are a few phrasing kinks and unnecessary inclusions that could be ironed out, as demonstrated in this encounter, there appeared to be fewer of these in future encounters I completed with Freed. For example, I spent about a minute conversing with another patient about their journey into law, and Freed did not include any of the information that would have been irrelevant to medical notes in the final generated text.

In more complex encounters that address multiple problems, Freed was able to generate and succinctly summarize an A&P, as demonstrated in this screenshot:

During this encounter, there was a lot of back and forth, addressing problems out of order without a clear, concise dictation pattern, yet Freed was still able to stay organized with the plan for each problem. Impressive!

Some caveats:

• While I was able to save some time on each encounter by not typing and be more attentive to my patient, I still had to go back and read each line to scan for errors. Double checking your scribe’s work does apply to all scribing services, so Freed doesn’t really lose out against a human scribe in this regard.

• Freed has not added multi-language support yet, so if you have many patients who do not speak English, then this may be a deal breaker for you.

• There is some inclusion of unnecessary information, which I believe could easily be ironed out from a coding standpoint and could happen very soon.

• Lastly, to my knowledge, there has not been any EHR integration as of yet, but this may soon change — something to consider!

Plan (would I use it?):

Freed is doing some amazing things in the AI medical scribing space. As of the time of this publication, they are offering 10 free sample patient encounters which was enough for me to get a good feel for the product. I was incredibly tempted to just hit the purchase button after exhausting my 10 free encounters. For the price of $99/mo or a 10% discount if you subscribe for a full year upfront ($1080/year), I would likely subscribe as an attending physician. However, I can’t quite afford it quite yet on my resident’s salary (if you’re reading this @Freed, we’re always open to be Ambassadors)! Some important points to consider if you’re eyeing this service is to consider the actual amount of time it will save you per day — and let’s be honest, isn’t time the most valuable thing to us? Who wouldn’t want to leave work on time consistently everyday?

What do you think? Would you try Freed out for free? Would you pay for the service? Would love to hear your thoughts!

‘Til next time,

Chase Cho, DO