Feeling burdened with administrative tasks, Michael Sherling, MD, MBA, found a way to make things easier not just for him, but for colleagues as well.
Sherling, chief medical and strategy officer and cofounder of health care information technology company ModMed, started the company 15 years ago after chatting with a patient, Dan Kane, who is a technologist.
“And after our skin check, we started the company,” he told Dermatology Times. “It’s designed to really save doctors and their staff time, which has really been our whole mission from the beginning.”
“ModMed Scribe is really cool,” Sherling explained. “It’s an AI-enabled technology built inside of our EMR that listens to a doctor and patient speak naturally and then predicts the note as if a person was typing on the iPad.” The system not only transcribes conversations but can also offer the customary prescriptions, lab orders, biopsies, Botox units, and body locations—key elements in dermatology documentation.
He acknowledged some clinicians may be skeptical about inviting AI into the examining room. “We want to automate the drudgery of healthcare. Things like documenting notes, filling out encounter forms, and writing requisition forms—why should doctors have to do that? If AI can predict structured data and integrate it into the EMR, it’s incredibly helpful,” he told Dermatology Times
“Recently, I’ve been volunteering in a clinic where I have no staff to help me. I do everything myself. This technology is a lifeline,” he added.
Accuracy of the tool was very important to Sherling, who translated his appreciation of efficacy data in clinical practice to ensuring accuracy in the AI product via rigorous testing. “There’s something called an F1 score, which measures the accuracy of AI predictions. In our internal testing, the F1 score for dermatologic diagnoses is around 98.4%, so it’s very accurate,” Sherling explained.
In addition to accuracy, Sherling is also dedicated to ensuring security, which remains a top priority for ModMed. “Our speech-to-text model is on-device, meaning the transcript stays inside the iPad, which is good from a security perspective,” he explained. “We train the model using only de-identified data—nothing that can identify a patient or doctor. And as an EHR company, we take security very seriously.”
For Sherling, ModMed Scribe is more than just a technological innovation—it’s a solution designed by a dermatologist for dermatologists. “Being a dermatologist is my identity, but I also help my customers because I am a customer,” he said. “I use the products we develop, ensuring they meet the needs of physicians. At the end of the day, we want doctors to focus on treating patients. Everything else is just noise.”
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