Dunkirk: A Certified 2A AI-Scribe Assists Doctors

The Alexandra Lepève Hospital has permanently adopted a clinical writing assistant from Tandem Health after three months of testing. Certified 2A, the tool transcribes consultations and generates reports, with medical validation in under two minutes. Its deployment is accompanied by strict protocols, HDS hosting in Europe, and ambitions for expansion across Europe.

Certification 2A, HDS Hosting, and Medical Responsibility Frame Usage

Tandem Health offers a clinical assistant recognized as a Class 2A medical device, a level of regulatory validation presented as unprecedented in Europe for this type of tool. The company regulates usage through strict protocols and trains the system to rely on existing databases and source its responses. The physician remains the sole responsible party for the medical record, with review and validation of the report being mandatory. Data flows transit through infrastructures compliant with regulations and are stored with health data hosts on secure servers within the European Union. Digital sovereignty and the confidentiality of health data are considered imperatives.

At Dunkirk Hospital, Reports Validated in Under Two Minutes

Following a three-month trial during which over 1,000 reports were produced, the Alexandra Lepève Hospital has definitively adopted the medical assistant from Tandem Health. The facility aims to free up medical time and optimize the working conditions of its 224 healthcare professionals. This assistant acts as an ambient scribe: it records conversations live using a microphone, gradually erases the audio to ensure confidentiality, organizes the transcription, and automatically creates a medical report. According to Samy Bayod, the hospital director, the review and validation phase takes an average of 1 minute and 34 seconds. He also notes a decrease in manual data entry and the elimination of note-taking several days after the consultation. In the emergency department, the assistant records discussions between the doctor, nurse, and radiologist, then directly feeds into the computerized patient record. In Dunkirk, the generated reports are validated in under two minutes, and consultations are transcribed in real time.

Deployments: About a Hundred Facilities in France, Over 5,000 in Europe

The medical assistant from Tandem Health is currently used in around one hundred healthcare facilities in France, including public hospitals, hospital centers, and private or associative structures such as ESPIC. At the European level, over 5,000 care facilities benefit from this solution, corresponding to several tens of thousands of users. Several hundred establishments are thus utilizing the medical scribe.

Technology Providers, Ambitions for Clinical OS, and Environmental Sensitivity

For audio transcription and language processing, Tandem Health combines solutions like ElevenLabs and OpenAI and claims that its technology is less prone to hallucinations than generalist AIs. The company aims to create a clinical operating system that interconnects all the tools of the establishment to modernize healthcare systems often hindered by aging infrastructures. Among the planned developments, an AI could in the future answer the phone 24/7, manage appointment scheduling in relation to practitioners' calendars, and perform pre-triage functions. Tandem Health emphasizes that its targeted and compressed models on dedicated servers do not have the same energy impact as consumer AIs, a point of concern for some caregivers sensitive to the environmental footprint of digital tools. Samy Bayod believes that AI allows the hospital to regain maneuverability, as the technology is intended to lighten the administrative and mental load on caregivers.