LaShawn Murray (MIE PhD student) is exploring how digital tools can improve health care delivery in First Nations communities, with a focus on reducing administrative burdens for nurses.
She is collaborating with OKAKI, an Alberta-based public health informatics social enterprise that delivers health services, professional consulting in privacy, analytics and program management, and develops custom software — with a focus on improving Indigenous health systems.
Murray is assessing the usability of the company’s novel AI scribe and its potential impact on clinical documentation workflows. AI scribes capture conversations between providers and patients to generate structured, regulatory-compliant clinical notes.
“Nurses have a high workload, especially on reserve, and documentation takes up a large part of their time,” says Murray, who is also a 2023 recipient of the IBET Momentum Fellowship in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.
“They’re responsible for recording patient encounters and completing various forms to access services and resources.”
In remote or underserved Indigenous communities, nurses are often the first — and consistent — point of contact for primary care. With less frequent physician visits due to demand or shortages, nurses play a critical role in delivering day-to-day health services, including chronic disease management, homecare and emergency response.
“What’s different in OKAKI’s case is the focus on nurses and homecare professionals, rather than physicians working in hospitals or specialty settings,” says Murray. “There’s almost no data on how these tools impact nurses.”
As part of her dissertation, Murray recently began visits to four pilot sites in First Nations communities near Calgary and Edmonton. She’ll evaluate how the AI scribe is integrated into clinical workflows, assess the quality of the generated notes, and explore its effect on provider–patient interactions.
Her assessment will also look at technical performance, such as how long the scribe takes to launch, its ability to distinguish between voices, how much of the clinical encounter it captures, whether it saves time, and how well it documents care services, including medication names and acronyms.
“There’s also the question of how we communicate using accessible language with patients, while still needing to document using medical terminology, and if there is a way for the scribe to support that differentiation,” says Murray.
The work builds on earlier research conducted in collaboration with Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, where she evaluated the effectiveness of AI scribes in primary care as an IBET Fellow.
In a recent article published in JMIR Human Factors and co-authored with her supervisor, Professor Enid Montague (MIE), the team studied six AI scribes used at the hospital. The study offered one of the first systematic evaluations of AI scribes developed for — or currently in use in — Canadian primary care. Some tools assessed are also used in the United States.
Findings showed that AI scribes can help reduce administrative burdens by making them accessible across multiple platforms — such as mobile devices, tablets and desktop computers — which better align with the diverse workflows and preferences. Researchers also found limitations when it came to accuracy, such as multiple scribes’ ability to translate unrelated conversations, multiple speakers, and the complexity of conditions discussed.
The study also showed that AI scribes could generate high-quality medical notes even from transcripts that were not perfect, while in some cases, excellent transcripts did not lead to equally strong medical notes.
The study has given Murray valuable insights into how to apply her findings in the OKAKI project, and will continue with data collection for OKAKI over the next five months.
She emphasizes that the work is rooted in community collaboration.
“It’s a highly collaborative process; research done with communities, not for them,” says Murray.
“We’re co-designing the research, looking at what informed consent should look like, what language to use, and how to ensure it’s accessible to the people we’re working with.”
