An insightful Q & A session with Dr. Khaki at the Tali and WELL Health webinar

We recently hosted a webinar, Relieving Physician Burnout with an Intelligent Virtual Assistant in collaboration with WELL Health in which we took a deep dive into Tali, a virtual assistant designed to assist physicians during their day-to-day administrative tasks such as documentation and charting - tasks that have been associated with physician burnout.

A demonstration was provided by Mahshid, Tali's CEO, on how this virtual assistant tool can be used to create forms and ticklers using voice commands. Further, she provided examples illustrating how physicians can begin entering patient information into EMRs in no time.

In this webinar, we invited Dr. Khaki, one of our longest-standing users. He joined us back in March, so let's learn a little about him. A physician since 1997, he has been practicing medicine for over twenty years. At present, he is a family physician working at Oakdale Medical Clinic in North York, Ontario. Considering he has been providing us with feedback since the beginning and has been able to experience Tali's development as it has evolved from many versions, we do find the feedback he offers to be very valuable to us.

This session between Morva, Tali's Project Manager, and Dr. Khaki aims to provide you with a physician's perspective on Tali's use in his practice.

So let’s just jump right in. 

Morva: Did you find it difficult to start using it, to install or just to get started in general? 

Dr. Khaki: No, the installation was very easy for me, and I appreciate the team's openness to new suggestions. As they started working, I offered some suggestions about features and options. They are open and working hard to add features as they move forward. I had no problems installing it, it was very easy. Just an extension to your Chrome and everything else is ready for use. 

Morva: When you first started using it, did you find it intuitive? I mean I won't put words in your mouth. What was your experience using Tali once you installed it?

Dr. Khaki: In the beginning, I was more hesitant, to be honest with you. I was not a fan of scribes or dictation programs because I tried a few of them. They were not very impressive to me, but this one has been much better than the other ones. I want to be honest, I'm not using Tali for all of my patients. I still use a lot of my own templates which are available in Oscar Pro and many other EMRs.  I have to create customized notes for some patients, such as those who are not classical cases, so you need to explain a lot and for that, Tali works very well.

Morva: And that's what we always like to hear. At the end of the day, our goal is to save you time. So however that is and whatever level that is, we're happy that we are able to provide you with more time back. How does Tali impact your workflow and productivity?

Dr. Khaki: Right. You see, in the past I was only using templates. But the problem with templates is that as a family doctor you can have templates for gastritis, laryngitis, hepatitis, and things like this, but you cannot use templates for the patient who comes with uncommon symptoms and strange history, something you did not expect. So in this case, if you want to protect yourself and write good notes, you have to type something like 10,15, or 20 lines. My typing speed isn't that fast, so it takes me at least 10 or 15 minutes, but when I use Tali for these cases, it reduces my time to maybe 2 or 3 minutes. I just have to concentrate to explain everything clearly and it is very good because it is familiar with medical terminology. Tali knows the names of medications and knows medical terminologies like TSH levels. It understands what you say every time, so for the patients that I've used it on other than those who used my templates, it's a huge time saver.

Morva: You mentioned that you weren't happy with other scribes, and you mentioned that you like how Tali understands medical terms, in spite of your accent. What was it about the other scribes that you felt was lacking? What is it about Tali that you appreciated a lot?

Dr. Khaki: Yeah, this is a very important question because I know there is another dictation software I tried, for example, Dragon. Maybe it was my accent, I don't know, but my experience was horrible. Whatever I said I had to type it again and again. However, Tali understands medical terminology and will understand vaccinations, immunizations, prophylaxis, treatment, prognosis, and other medical terms you say. In addition, Tali has become very fast with the improvements you made. For example, I have a case about a young teenager who has a lot of family issues. You cannot use your templates for these things.  You have to explain what the issue is with the father and mother, and what the problem is now. You can easily dictate it and it's very fast. 

Morva: I'm so happy to hear that you're able to use it in that sense. And I also just wanna throw this in, accessibility is so important, especially in Canada, because of all the different accents that we all have as Canadians. One of the reasons we focused on accents was because of that. We're constantly prioritizing and including more and more accents and focusing on the medical community. Tali is pretty good with medical terms dictated with various accents. 

Dr. Khaki: What I’d like to say is that I have a feeling that it’s learning it (medical terminologies) from me. For example, just today, 2 hours ago, I was dictating with Tali. I said to take the VDRL test for syphilis - at the beginning, there was some difficulty for Tali to understand it, maybe because of my accent. I corrected it and the next time I said exactly VDRL, exactly VDRL was typed. I have used it several times after that and every other time it was correct. 

Morva: What was your specific experience with other solutions? Have you ever used a human scribe? What made you continue to keep looking and trying other tools? Anything that you used, anything that you tried before you were able to find Tali and then stop looking. 

Dr. Khaki: Actually with a human scribe, if you mean a human being, no, I don't have any experience with that. But I'm not at all a fan of that because I don't like the way it works - like telling someone to type something for you. In my case, I prefer to do it myself because I may have to change things at the last minute. so I cannot give a final version to someone to do it for me. But as I said with other scribes, I have personally used Dragon and I had heard many good things about it, but unfortunately, it was not living up to my expectations. So I preferred to type instead, but then you released the Tali, the version, the new fast version, maybe 3-4 months ago if I'm not wrong, or five months ago then I tried it and I said wow, now there is a difference!

Morva: This is why we're happy you stuck with us from the beginning. I think it was our second version that came out a few months ago and then our third version just came out very recently. How happy are you with how quickly we're introducing these features, with the speed in which we are improving and updating them in general, and the direction in which we're taking with our features and prioritization of the improvements? 

Dr. Khaki: First of all, I'm very happy that you're very good listeners and whatever, at least I am suggesting I see that you're trying to improve Tali with it. Right, so I'm very happy with the speed of improvements in Tali. I believe you are doing a very great job and for the latest features, to be honest, I tried them several times to see how they work. They were very fast, but. I'm still not used to them. Whenever I’m in my practice I remind myself, oh, I could have used Tali for this but I'm not completely used to that yet. But yeah, I see you are adding new features every day, every month. The latest I guess was opening the forms and setting up ticklers as Mahshid did in the demo.

Morva: That's the kind of feedback that we love getting from you. Just honest. We love to hear it and we love to understand what it is that keeps you from being able to use us in a way that helps you personally as a physician.

Dr. Khaki: I don't think it is difficult at all. No, it is not difficult. Specifically, it is like getting a small, very small part of your feature as an extension. It is removable. If it is blocking something you can remove it, and when you work with it, it opens itself. The only thing is that maybe you need a little bit of time to get familiar with every new feature. 

Morva: As we progress and add these new features, I would like to know what value you see Tali providing for you in your day-to-day and in your workflow.

Dr. Khaki: I'm very, I'm very optimistic and I believe you are doing a very good job Tali. You will hear from Tali in the future much more than what you know now and honestly, I believe that you are doing a great job. You know for example when I work with Tali sometimes on a tough day where you have a patient who is unhappy, or angry for some reason not cooperating with you. Well, in this case, you are already frustrated from the encounter with the patient, which sometimes happens right, so you want to document it. Of course, you cannot use your template for that case, right? So you have to explain what happened when the patient was not happy with what you said or when the patient started to argue with you. The notes will be about 20 lines long if you want to write and about 20 minutes to type. Tali can do that in 3 minutes so it's a time saver when you are in difficult situations. 

Morva: I would like to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer my questions. We appreciate it so much. Just like all of you who are here right now attending, we know how busy you are. So it's definitely valued. 

Dr. Khaki: Thank you. I want to thank you for being open and accepting new suggestions. This is very good and I believe you are really doing a good job. 

Morva: Thank you, Dr. Khaki. It's lovely working with you.

As this session draws to a close, we anticipate that we have been able to provide some insight and clarity into how Tali can be used to help a physician with the endless number of administrative tasks that they have to deal with on a daily basis.

We invite you to join Dr. Khaki and the other physicians who are already using Tali to simplify their lives.

Book a 1:1 meeting with Morva, click here to get started or Download Tali today.