**The Power of AI for Good: Revolutionizing Clinical Notes**

In a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is often perceived as a threat to human jobs and efficiency, Ross and his team are pushing back against this narrative. Instead, they're leveraging AI to augment human capabilities, making people's lives better in the process.

**Two Options to Enhance Patient Experience**

Ross highlighted the importance of providing patients with options when it comes to clinical notes. "We said okay, you have two options: you can have it there with you and then we'll help with whatever paperwork is after the fact," he explained. Alternatively, patients can be prompted to discuss their experiences, allowing clinicians to capture valuable insights without feeling obligated to record every detail. This approach acknowledges that some people may not be enthusiastic about having their conversations recorded, especially when they're sensitive in nature.

**Using Speech-to-Text Technology**

To address concerns around patient confidentiality, Ross's team partnered with deep grammar technology to create speech-to-text solutions. This allowed them to capture the essence of clinical notes without retaining any potentially compromising audio. The resulting transcripts were used solely for documentation purposes and disassociated from the original recording, further protecting patients' rights.

**A Clinician-Centric Approach**

By prioritizing clinicians' needs and concerns, Ross's team has developed scripts for delivery that help alleviate anxiety around recording patient conversations. "We put all of that in our privacy policy," he noted, emphasizing the importance of transparency and trust-building. This approach ensures that clinicians feel empowered to share their experiences with patients without fear of retribution or judgment.

**AI for Good: Empowering Human Capabilities**

The narrative around AI often focuses on its potential to replace human jobs, but Ross's team is challenging this assumption. Instead, they're harnessing the power of AI to augment human capabilities, making people more efficient and effective in their work. This approach acknowledges that humans are tool builders, capable of creating innovative solutions when given the right tools.

**A Study on Animal Efficiency**

To illustrate the point, Ross referenced a study from the 1980s that ranked animals according to speed and efficiency. When recalibrated with human cyclists, the results showed that humans were significantly outperformed. This anecdote highlights the importance of understanding human capabilities and leveraging AI to support, rather than replace, human efforts.

**Efficiency Gains in Content Creation**

AI's role in content creation is another area where Ross's team has made significant strides. By automating tasks such as documentation, clinicians can focus on high-value activities like building relationships with patients. This shift enables them to work more efficiently and effectively, freeing up time for personal pursuits.

**AI for Good: A Focus on Human Well-being**

Ross's team is committed to using AI in ways that prioritize human well-being and relationship-building. By harnessing the power of AI to augment human capabilities, they're creating a better future for clinicians, patients, and families alike. As Ross noted, "We want to show people how it's making their lives better...they feel good about using AI and know they're using it in the right way."

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the AI Minds podcast this is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built AI first I'm your host Demetrios and this episode is brought to you by Deep gram the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the internet today trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like Spotify twilio NASA and City Bank we are joined by none other than the co-founder and CEO of clinical notes AI Ross how you doing today man great good morning well I know you're on a whole different side of the globe we were just talking about how you're in Sunny San Diego right now and you got done with a workout and so I appreciate you making time for me to chat a little bit more about your story and what you've gotten up to you have a really fascinating journey and it starts in the cyber security sector can you break down what you were doing there yeah absolutely so you know when the mortgage industry crashed back in 2008 and 2009 we said what are we going to do so essentially there was a a little startup named iboss out of San Diego California they had about six employees and I came on really as the first salesperson there and uh got introduced to technology so that's you know really where I got my journey started and got my taste of uh you know an IP network table and what the heck that was and what was active directory that was you know quite quite a new world for me early on in my career excellent and so then you said all right 2008 I'm going to try and get a sales job I imagine that did well for you you learned a lot about the tech and then you kept going deeper and deeper yeah exactly um well I was so overwhelmed you know with what I didn't know that I really just dove in to learn how networks fun functioned learned how cyber security worked and and you know we got into protecting kids online by blocking them from getting access to pornography at the network level um so that really started my journey into like you know Behavioral Health Tech but cyber security as well so it was something that was quite interesting that helped people but uh and kept kids safe online but ALS o is technically very interesting I'm sure there was a lot of very frustrated 16-year-old boys out there because of what you were doing people asked me they said what do you do I said I ruin 14-year-old boy's dreams poor guys but it's also good so break down this whole like behavioral Tech idea and then where that took you yeah absolutely so you know we were pretty early on at iboss and you know within a couple of years we became the market share leader in you know blocking students from getting to inappropriate content to keep them safe online and ultimately that turned into even being able to see what kids could type in or typing into Google and we started seeing you know children that were at risk from a self harm perspective so it started to really go that direction um and then we took on you know some capital from Goldman Sachs and you know the the company started to go more towards Enterprise and from there uh you know I got a phone call from a little company out of Australia that was really focused on you know protecting kids online and you know giving parents the ability to you know have some uh control over you know how often their kids use the internet what applications they use that type of a thing um and we started positioning that with school so that uh was a role where uh I led North America I was actually the first employee in North America and we grew that company from a million to about a little over 100 million in five years in Revenue uh and that was that was quite a journey uh to to say to say the least I learned a lot we hired a lot we acquired companies we raised a bunch of capital and I really cut my teeth at that particular role so you saw the Pains of scaling a company what are some big takeaways that you now are implementing in your current role uh well ultimately being customers uh obsessed and problem obsessed right as you see problems you know in in the market you know rather than coming up with our own ideas and pushing them out to the market it's really about learning exactly the uh how your customer and ideal uh user lives their day you know their day-to- day inside of their particular role and what matters to them and then really understanding their problems and aligning the technology there you know when you can do that and communicate that story you're partnering with them right you're not really selling anything if you will and then while that's happening preparing the organization for the level of scale right you know taking the amount of having the big dream in the vision to you know dominating your market and solving you know the problem collectively for your entire space and preparing your organiz ation to say hey if we get you know 10 million users what does that look like right and things that you do with a million users and 10 million users fundamentally have to be written in a different way right so really preparing the organization and being customer obsessed are there things that you recognize you needed to be focused on in different stages I I like this idea of really thinking big to try and expand the mind and expand the vision but I imagine like on the organizational level when you're at a million and you're the only person in the US going from a million to 10 million has its unique challenges then 10 million to 50 million has its unique challenges and then 50 to 100 plus are whole different challenges in bottlenecks so anything that stood out for you in each of these different phases yeah to get to the next phase right as you're reaching up that Cliff to to to grab on of the next Rock and throw your leg over the branch and and get up there you have to do things that aren't scalable at first right you know you you have to uh ultimately you know maybe lose on your first couple of deals to get there and really learn what that next level is like um and set that expectation really with your customers you know as you grow but you know also preparing your team I think that's incredibly important to say you know hey we're rapidly growing you may have to wear some hats that you know aren't in your exact and perfect job description but that's part of the fun and really just smelling the Roses along the journey because you're going to trip and fall and scrape your elbow um and preparing your customers your team um your staff and letting them know it's okay to make a mistake so that because you know they're going to happen they're going to learn from but that you know really helps breed the and and set a culture of innovation across your organization when people feel like they're okay to to try things right um as long as those expectations are there for your customers and and your team um it's it's a really fun journey and so that's you know that's it have fun and um you know really try things uh that of uh you know from the smart people that you've hired allow them to make those decisions and try I really like this idea of on those first few deals that you're going for where you're trying to level up you should be okay with losing as long as you're learning along the way and it makes me instantly think like how do you have enough conviction in yourself or your product to know that okay it's our products good or whatever we're learning along the way we're tweaking it and we're making those changes but we have the conviction in ourselves to be able to get to that next level right yeah that's that's really exactly it um and you know we even because we're transparent with that process you know when when I was at uh line wise um which was the student safety company I was most recently at you know we got into the biggest deal that we had ever been in I think it was 75,000 users at you know at seven gigabits per second uh that they were on demand from the bandwidth pect uh perspective and we really we struggled there right but we learned a lot we broke our Appliance we took their Network down you know and ultimately you know they we we lost the proof of concept but we built a relationship with that CI CIO first of all he said you know I need to move to something a bit more stable and that was fine and we understood it but he said our support and our effort and our attention in detail was better than he's ever seen and he ended up referring multiple other large organizations to us uh that we you know we took the learnings from his organization applied them there and ultimately I think you know two and a half years later we won him back as a customer so you know you live to fight another day you take your you know your lumps and you you learn from those right builds character Incredible so then walk me through the next phase of your journey yeah so one of the things we designed um at line wise was an AI based tool that looked for early indicators of suicide School violence sexually abused children substance use disorder and kids um by monitoring Network traffic um and what was going into a device where you know we found early indicators of that we ranked them from an AI perspective and then when there was you know a significant potential you know issue that was coming up we would call the school counselor call the school principal uh Etc in sometime in some cases we even florted um some school violent events where our weapons were found in backpack tax um so it was incredible now uh and very meaningful now how how did I get into clinical notes AI well there is a problem with some school districts we work with so for example we deployed that application to a large school district in Southern California and ultimately after a month of a trial they said we're not buying turn it off and we said we looked at our logs we said well why they said uh we thwarted you know four different suicidal events in children and you know we're keeping Kids Safe in your district and they said look our behavioral health staff is so overwhelmed that we cannot handle the amount of alerts alerts that are coming in so from a liability perspective we cannot have these things sitting in our inbox so turn it off oh no and that really kept me up at night right um and as they kept kept me up at night I I thought about about it and started interviewing some of those counselors some of those you know principles and talk to the CIO offline he's like if we would we could he's like but our our legal team said we can't so I as I interviewed them I I asked them if I get to the clinicians I said if I could give you a magic wand and you could make one thing go away what would it be and they said my notes and my documentation take up so much of my time and we estimated that we looked at it and started researching it's about 30 anywhere from 20 to 35% average is 30 uh what these notes and documentation what does this look like what does that like yeah so every meeting that they have in certain um schools and Behavioral Health departments especially if they're billing insurance they have to docu they have to create a treatment plan they have to create a progress note um they have to do an assessment on them and then they have to do kind of a final uh discharge uh type of a document so the treatment plans will take him 30 to 45 minutes a kid um or a patient the progress notes on average is about 15 minutes after every single um patient or student that they see um and if you think about you know the amount of time that adds up if they're seeing six seven eight you know clients or students a day uh which is about 30% of their time how many more children could they help right suicide is the number two cause of death for people 24 it's horrible and you know we have even internally have an experience uh with that so you know when I left uh my previous organization we founded this I founded this with um the clinical psychologist out of Australia her name was Jordan Foster she won businesswoman of the year in 2020 she we had actually acquired her business in Australia um and she was a very dear friend to me and co-founder in this business and right before we actually launched our product um we actually lost her to mental health um so you know her Legacy is with us um and we're building a this in her honor um and in the honor for the mental health of Behavioral Health clinicians not a lot of people think about how was my doctor's mental health how is my therapist's mental health because they're helping me um they should be fine whether or not and a major burden for them is their administrative duties and they're carrying everybody else's burdens as they're helping people as well so it's a tough role and most technology is built uh to to give them more work there's not a lot that's built to reduce the administrative burden on their plate to help them so that's what we've built wow so first off really sorry to hear that and it's a very difficult situation as you mentioned most of the time when we go to our therapists it's like we it's very much like at least when I'm going it's like me me me me me type thing I'm not sitting there asking my therapist like so how are you doing right and what tell me what's on your mind and so I very I see that what you're talking about and it is like there is a weight that can be carried silently because sometimes I imagine it's hard as a therapist to speak about this stuff because you're the one who's supposed to be keeping everybody else up and making everybody else feel good uh and so that's very rough to hear about but you continued to interview people and you continue to say what is it about this like if we could get rid of this documentation and this writing that you need to do and we could save you 15 minutes per kid that you see at the end of the day if you tally that up that's like a couple hours worth of documentation that they have to do and so out of that clinical notes was born is that how it yeah absolutely so with the magic Wan statement we said we said okay generative AI was very new and we knew the summarization capabilities of it and we knew you know llama 2 had just come out just released it open source hugging face was there you know there were some some models that were available but also some off the shelf stuff too that was decent so you know we ultimately built an MVP uh very small you know in the cloud in partnership with deep gram in partnership with you know open AI right I think everybody was touching that and and our own model um really as well and we put it together and pushed it out to the counselors at that particular School District actually and they started using it and said where's this been my entire life this is changing my life and then we knew that we found a problem that we could solve so it it was very exciting the first day we rolled it out to them we had 24 mental health clinici sign up for and we were I mean jumping up high-fiving excited uh they started using the product and then uh they started sharing it with their clinical friends that were outside of public sector so they started sharing it with other behavior health clinics and then they were reaching out to us and asking us if they could use it for free and we're like okay this is this is starting to go out let's let this fire burn so it really started to go viral in the Southern California Behavioral Health kind of industry if you will and then we said all right well let's build this puppy for scale so you know with our experience of you know previously um you know building a company up to you know serving over 13 million daily average users uh we started to build our infrastructure and you know we've we can look around corners with some of that so uh yeah we that was how clinical notes AI was born and we continued to you know get additional MVPs uh deployments and you know scale of product took us around you know four months to actually build the product until we were ready for G uh GA and then you know we added pricing in it hooked it up to to stri created some automation there and we we actually launched the product um GA on January 22nd um a 224 and have you noticed that it is mainly word of mouth that's been the reason for the growth well yes and some influencers really as well which I guess is technically word of mouth too so essentially we had what you know uh what kicked us off really and we built a dual go to market model which I'll get into in just a minute but what kicked us off uh really was a an influencer on YouTube that only talks about clinical documentation for therapists I mean how perfect of a of an influencer had found our product reached out to us for a demo and she said by the way I have a YouTube channel with 29,000 mental Behavior Health Specialists that I talk about notes with can I do a review on your product what did I tell her you think uh absolutely I said can we do a REV share or some no I do not take any any type of compensation at all um I just want to review your product so she did a review and then boom it exploded you know from there and we created a referral program as well uh and that's that's part of our kind of uh individual and small group practitioner approach but we have a a dual go to market approach um as well for the Enterprise which we're doing really well in too and is it it as you mentioned there's been this timesaving aspect I imagine you're getting people that are reaching out to you saying like I'm able to see x amount of more students is that like the main value prop that you're saying like you can now see more patients because of all this paperwork that gets cut out well here's the thing in Behavioral Health people get into it because they care about people so that's that's instant problem right not to mention the be the me the you know the mental health of the clinicians which we'll get into in a second but then we go okay we show the demo we talk about it and we go how much time do we think that AI could shave off of their not and documentation time see if I say it's suspect if they say it's true so they go well shoot about 40% usually is what they say our reports are showing about 60 but we go okay let's go with 40 all right so if you're at 1.4 million right and it's 40 That's 600,000 you know dollarss plus a year if you can shave that off well what's the cost of our product a little bit less than that no so the ROI is really there from a business sense perspective um and then just the lives of of of the people yeah it's super clear if you can put it in those types of numbers because someone is like and it's not like as you mentioned the clinician isn't stoked to be doing paperwork I imagine there's not really a lot of people that get out of bed and think like wow I hope I can do more paperwork today than I did yesterday right yeah there there's that whole side of it where you get to empower people to do what they do best and let the bureaucracy part of it kind of go under the hood and so can you break down how exactly it works are people just recording conversations with their phone in the in in their like uh what is it called when they see a patient or like what what does it actually look like to get the documentation done for you or or have a co-pilot doing the documentation with you so there's a couple of ways that we do capture right it's all about how do you get the AI the data to be able to help you okay so we offer a live option to where the uh the AI um actually listens to the conversation live and then takes that transcript that's built submits it to one of our microservice multi llm infrastructure and then from there it does the summarization it does a presential diagnosis Etc um and contextualizes things out of that transcript um uh through a trained and fine-tuned llm that's designed to write clinical documentation that aligns with insurance reimbursement for them so they talk about you know hey I got a new cat yesterday right that's not going to be in the conversation it's only going to be within Ally relevant so that's option one option two is talk to your AI scribe so we call ourselves a therapeutic describe so we actually are using deep gram to speak to the actual clinician to where they can have a conversation it says describe your session for me they'll go ahead and describe what happened on their session how their client presented any assessments they did and then the AI will actually AI will actually ask questions to them and then when they answer those it'll then take that information transcript again and do the same thing create a note or a document so really in this space it's all about informed consent and the client being aware that AI is being used to listen to the conversation right it's very sensitive information even more so than uh medical Phi right you may not care if if it gets out that somebody knows how many you know what your te- cell count is in your blood but you're going to care if you tell somebody a very deep dark traumatic story of some level of abuse you've experienced or a marital conflict or those types of things so highly sensitive so we give those different types of options to our customers yeah that makes a lot of sense and then wow so let me just try and summarize everything here because it feels like this is very cool what you've been able to do is you said okay you have two options you can have it there with you and then it will help whatever the paperwork is after the fact or you can be prompted and then you as the clinician can talk about what you just went through and what you were talking about and all of that fun stuff because I imagine some people aren't super excited to have uh their conversations being recorded when it is this sensitive and that's a key factor and strategy we actually made so we use the speech to text you know technology through uh through partnering with deep gram and then uh from there that audio is discarded immediately it can't be subpoena it can't be pulled the transcript that we get out of that we use just uh enough to create the document or the note and then that is disassociated as well so uh we put all of that in our privacy policy we have scripts for clinicians to read to patients and there's there's generally a fear of that up front but it's all about the delivery for them and we get a lot of feedback from our customers that I'm surprised all of my customers are okay with this and people actually intrigued with it um you know especially because it helps their clinician well Ross this is super cool to see and I'm very excited for what you're doing it is as you mentioned AI for good in a way and so I wanted to talk a bit about that theme and the I think the narrative right now the general narrative is that like AI is going to come it's going to take our jobs it's going to destroy everything feels like you've really found a way to leverage what we are capable of doing today not some far-fetched story in the future right not like some fantasy or sci-fi book that may or may not happen you said what can we do today to help people's lives be better and let's do it let's put it into practice let's see how well it works and let's see how people respond to that I mean AI for good is such a good theme and hash tag frankly right I think you know we could go out and use our minds to create an application that uses AI to help you trade stocks better and and those are out there and those are great right but you know what's the purpose of really why we're here um and is to really um care about other people right um and to and to build relationships so it actually does the opposite of I think what a lot of people think it does right it's going to take my job you know uh people aren't going to uh people are going to be lazy you know Etc that's not the case humans are tool Builders right you know I think there was a study done back in the 80s and I think it was on Popular Mechanics where it ranked the animals versus you know the humans and the humans were ranked I think ninth or tenth in that particular study on their own from speed from efficiency Etc but then they looked at uh they recalibrated that with a human on a bike and the human on the bike was incred was number one by far right we are tool Builders what we've done here with AI is build a tool to help humans be more efficient look at all the different medicines that can come out of this look at uh how many more diseases can be detected look at how much time it can save so that you know clinicians can build better relationships with their patients so that they can focus on their families and not do notes and documentation on weekends right it's making us much more efficient from a Content creation perspective there's so many millions of new problems that AI can help humans solve so that they can focus on their family so they can focus on their wives and their husbands and their and their relationships uh to free up the time that we would spend nights and weekends maybe you know writing that white paper or writing those that documentation so AI for good to really help the people who help people is what we're focused on and I I think it's really important that we get the word out about that because you know a lot of fear just comes from ignorance which is just a lack of knowledge and you know is uh we explain and show people how it's making their lives better they feel good about using Ai and they know they're using it really in the right way of course excellent Ross well I'm very excited for everything that you've got coming and what you are doing I appreciate you coming on here and exploring and talking about your journey with us does and everything that you're doing with clinical notes thanks to me you guys for having me on and it's always a pleasure to connect with you and hopefully we can do it again soon\n"