Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Imagine you’re a harried physician, trying to manage patient care while documenting the necessary information for providers to reimburse you for the visit or procedure required to address the patient’s needs.

During yesterday’s edition of the annual KTech PULSE Summit from the Knoxville Technology Council, Dr. Clay Callison, Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer at the University of Tennessee Medical Center (UTMC), said, “For every minute I spend seeing a patient, I spend another minute documenting the visit.”

He’s a practicing Critical Care Physician who spends 25 percent of his time seeing patients. Callison explained that, regardless of the health system – Covenant, Tennova, or UTMC, “There are more patients than we can care for,” and doctors are retiring faster than their replacements can be trained.

Now, thanks to a project launched at the end of June involving Callison and 13 other primary care or specialists, documenting time has been reduced by 17.8 percent. In the four-month period ending in October, 7,356 notes were created through an Oracle service known as ambient listening.

He said that the 14 participating physicians reported a 93 percent reduction in the time required to document their notes and a satisfaction rate of 100 percent.

In a keynote speech delivered by Dr. Travis Humble, Director of the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he noted that it was 100 years ago that Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger led the development to understand microscopic phenomena, now known as the “old quantum theory,” that, in turn, led to the full development of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s.

“One of the key things we’re trying to solve (at ORNL) is classical computers vs. quantum computers,” Humble said. If I understood him correctly, the Chinese have a quantum that is able to take what would take six billion years on a more traditional computer would only take five minutes on a quantum computer.

Humble added that ORNL is working with two quantum computing start-ups – Quantum Brilliance in Australia and IQM Quantum in Finland.

They were two of four speakers who addressed the annual event from the organization that develops, connects, and promotes the growth of the technology community in the greater Knoxville region.

1. Travis Howerton, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of RegScale, the Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) platform, described a soon-to-be-released report on the “Technology State of the Union” in the region that he proudly noted was compiled by Taylor, his daughter and a graduating high school senior. The report is 113 pages long.
2. Dr. Monica Ihli, Senior Manager of AI Engineering at RegScale, that described the evolution of the company from what she said was “reactive compliance to predictive assurance.”

The event concluded with a panel on artificial intelligence (AI), moderated by Howerton, that included: (1) Dr. Vasileios Maroulas, UT, Knoxville’s Associate Vice Chancellor and Director of AI Tennessee; (2) Marcus Blair, Founder of Omega Business Solutions; (3) Jason Graf, Chief Operating Officer of The IT Company; and (4) Emma Lee, IT Account Manager at Patriot Talent Solutions.

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