Prior to joining Ubie, a Japanese health tech startup that leverages AI to enhance patient experiences and streamline healthcare operations, I worked as a neurologist. The numerous clinical duties and extensive paperwork, some of which required manual completion, often left me feeling overwhelmed. I was concerned about the impact this had on the care and attention I could provide to my patients, which is why I was drawn to Ubie.

Our mission is to assist healthcare professionals in focusing on what truly matters: dedicating meaningful time to their patients and making administrative tasks, such as inputting medical records and writing referrals, more efficient.

Currently, we are developing products that utilize Google’s Gemini models, fine-tuned on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, in real-world clinical settings. Through our close collaboration with Google, we are able to refine these advanced models to understand the specific nuances of Japanese healthcare. This enables the AI to utilize voice recognition and summarization to assist doctors and nurses with the significant challenge of creating numerous discharge summaries, referral letters, and informed consent documents.

Our work is already making a tangible impact across medium- to large-sized hospitals in rural areas of Japan:

• At Keiju General Hospital, the team employs our AI-powered discharge summary tools, resulting in a significant reduction of 42.5% in the time nurses spend on these tasks, as well as a decrease of 27.2% in their psychological burden. Notably, further research revealed that the impact was most pronounced for longer hospital stays, where there is a higher cognitive load for nurses.
• At Yokokura Hospital, a medium-sized hospital located in Kyushu, the voice transcription and summarization features powered by Gemini improved the efficiency of documenting patient explanations by 33%.
• In a trial at Kyushu University hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Japan, summarizing and standardizing referral letters led to a 54% increase in efficiency for doctors preparing admission summaries.

These changes ultimately enable healthcare professionals to devote more time to patients, resulting in improved quality of care. This is precisely the reason I chose to become a doctor.

Efficiency in healthcare is particularly crucial in Japan, which faces an aging population and a shrinking workforce. Additionally, securing administrative staff, especially in rural areas, can be challenging. Combined, these factors place a considerable operational strain on hospitals. AI has the potential to be a game-changer in helping alleviate some of this burden while creating tangible differences in how we perform our work and how we care for our patients.