Otolaryngology Workflow: Dr. Hu's Strategy for Faster Pre-Charting and Multilingual Patient Handouts with Empathia AI
Vancouver Coastal Health
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Doctor
Dr. Amanda Hu
Specialty
Otolaryngology (ENT)
I need a medical documentation note for referring doctors rather than patient referrals, and I need to avoid constantly having to fix formatting issues in Plexia.
The challenge
Before Empathia
- Inefficient Document Capture: The process of capturing and organizing external patient documents was laborious, often involving inefficient steps like downloading files to the desktop before integrating them into the EMR workflow.
- Multilingual Communication Barrier: Serving a diverse population, the clinic needed a streamlined way to handle multilingual consultations (specifically Chinese) and generate accessible, accurate patient handouts in different languages.
- EMR Formatting Friction (Plexia): Copying and pasting medical documentation templates into the clinic's EMR (Plexia) frequently resulted in formatting issues, wasting time and adding unnecessary administrative effort.
Working within a large health authority like Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), Dr. Amanda Hu’s practice handles complex documentation, requiring seamless integration with EMR systems like Plexia and managing diverse patient populations. Her priority when exploring an AI scribe was not just note generation, but systematic efficiency: automating the cumbersome pre-visit workflow, ensuring documentation clarity for referring doctors, and providing accessible information for non-English speaking patients. Her specific interest in patient-reported outcome measurements (PROMs) calculation shows a clinical focus on data-driven patient care.
The Transformation
After Empathia
Key Improvements
Intake & Pre-Charting
- Document Capture: She learned to use the "capture screen" feature to upload documents directly, bypassing the need to save files to the desktop—a key efficiency gain.
- AI Pre-Visit Summaries: The clinic is now equipped to send intake questionnaires via QR code or link to patients. The AI automatically summarizes these responses into a pre-visit summary, significantly reducing manual pre-charting time.
Documentation & EMR Integration
- Template Management: Dr. Hu can set a default template and manually select alternate templates for different documentation needs, ensuring consistency for the medical notes sent to referring doctors.
- Plexia Workarounds: To solve the formatting issues in Plexia, she was trained on two reliable workarounds: using rich text notes or simply copying as plain text, eliminating repetitive troubleshooting. She can also use Smart Edits to customize her note style, including removing the clinic signature.
Telehealth & Multilingual Support
- Telehealth Workflow: Dr. Hu was demonstrated how to use Empathia's telehealth features, including setting up caller ID, recording phone calls (which sync automatically), and using the new video conferencing feature with hospital Zoom accounts.
- Multilingual Documentation: Empathia's system allows for multilingual medical notes by automatically detecting and translating Chinese input to English output. Critically, she learned how to generate patient handouts in both English and Chinese versions for improved patient understanding and compliance.
Dr. Hu's targeted adoption of Empathia AI has immediately delivered tangible workflow improvements across the administrative lifecycle of a patient visit. By bypassing slow, old-school file downloads with the capture screen and automating the manual data entry of intake forms with AI Pre-Visit Summaries, she can start her patient consultations with all critical information summarized and ready. The solution to the Plexia formatting issues removes daily administrative friction, and the ability to generate Chinese patient handouts directly improves patient literacy and care equity at VCH.
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Key Features Used
Multilingual Support
Accurate transcription in 30+ languages enables inclusive, error-reduced documentation and patient handouts in their preferred language.
AI Pre-Visit Intake
AI-led patient intake that collects information before the visit—via voice or text—and organizes it into a clean, structured summary.
Telemed
All-in-one built-in Telemed on mobile and web—call patients directly or start a secure video visit with automatic, seamless documentation.
