Clinics: patient history ready before consultation

The consultation starts before the patient sits down, in the time spent reading rather than listening

The problem

A meaningful share of a consultation is spent on information the system already has somewhere: prior visits, existing conditions, medication history and whatever the patient can recall of their own symptoms in the moment. History-taking and reading prior notes routinely consume the first third of an appointment slot, and that time comes directly out of the time available to actually examine and discuss the patient's current concern.

The usual answer

Clinics compensate with intake forms, filled in on paper or a tablet in the waiting room, which helps for the questions a form can ask well and does nothing for a prior record living in a different system. Some add a nurse-led pre-screening step, which shifts the time cost rather than removing it and introduces another handoff where information can be lost between what the nurse heard and what the clinician later reads. A rushed few minutes with the chart open before the patient walks in covers less ground than either.

How we approach it

We build pre-consultation AI that gathers and summarises what is already known before the appointment starts: prior visits and records pulled from the system that holds them, and, where the workflow allows it, symptom information collected directly from the patient ahead of time in their own words. The summary is written for a clinician to scan in under a minute, not as a replacement for the record itself, and stays clearly attributed to its source so nothing gets treated as confirmed that has not actually been confirmed.

What changes

The clinician opens with a question about the patient rather than a question about the paperwork. Time in the room shifts from reconstructing history toward actually listening to what has changed since the last visit, and the appointment covers more of what the patient came in for.