Ever since we launched Guava Visit Prep in January 2023, it has become a heavily used and much-loved part of Guava for many of our users. For those less familiar, Visit Prep lets users prepare a document to take with them to their doctor visits that is tailored to that particular visit. You can pull in data already in your Guava profile (like metrics or symptom logs), add any other relevant information for the visit, and also list questions or requests you have for your doctor.
According to our users, it has not only reduced the stress of pre-appointment preparations but also fostered more insightful conversations with their providers. By helping patients provide a more complete presentation of their medical concern, Visit Prep can help doctors to make more informed diagnoses or treatment adjustments.
Much has changed in the world since January 2023, and in the tech space, we’ve seen a rise to prominence of generative AI and derived applications. It's transforming various sectors, from e-commerce to the arts, making once complex tasks appear simple. In fact, maybe this very post is being written by a chatbot (just kidding).
At Guava, like at many other companies out there, we recognized the potential of this technology and explored ways to integrate it with our offerings. This is what led us to Auto Prep - an enhancement to the Visit Prep experience that makes it faster and easier to prepare for your next doctor visit.
With Auto Prep, our AI-powered assistant will generate an initial version of a Visit Prep summary based on your answers to a few questions. You can say as much or as little as you’d like, and the generated summary will also draw from the information that’s already in your Guava profile - much like the regular version of Visit Prep. After the initial auto-generation, you can treat it like any other Visit Prep summary and use the UI to make edits as you see fit before exporting it to a PDF for printing or sharing electronically with your provider.
These similarities are by design - we wanted Auto Prep to be the same core product with a bit of AI magic sprinkled on top, rather than a completely different feature. Still, there are some places where that magic really shines through. Let’s take a look at an example Auto Prep conversation, and some excerpts from the resulting Visit Prep summary:
Fewer buttons to press
We spent a lot of time streamlining the UI for Visit Prep, but sometimes you just don’t want to press any buttons - especially if you’re having a rough day with your symptoms. In the example above, the assistant has automatically identified headaches as the chief complaint for the visit based on your conversation and added previously logged headaches into the chart. It has also compared this data with other information already in Guava - like running data from Fitbit, and days when you took Ibuprofen.
Smarter integration with your Guava profile
There are a lot of ways to say the same thing, and sometimes you can’t remember if your medical record references Advil or Ibuprofen. Auto Prep does a great job in intelligently recognizing between brand names and generic compounds (like the example above) or understanding that “my head has been hurting” is referring to the symptom that you typically log as “headache”.
Improved question suggestions
Having well-informed questions is a key part of what helps patients feel empowered during their doctor visit, and Auto Prep takes the suggested questions experience (which was already available in Visit Prep) to a whole new level. Synthesizing information into a series of questions is a bread-and-butter task for generative AI, and as a result, Auto Prep is able to offer some very individualized suggestions. These questions not only draw from what the user said to the assistant in the conversation, but also from past medical history.
All of the technology that we’ve developed at Guava aims to enhance the relationship between patients and providers and automate away the tediousness of personal health administrative tasks. Auto Prep is no different, and it’s certainly not a replacement for a human doctor. Have a doctor’s visit coming up? Try it out and let us know if it helped!
Guava Visit Prep is free to use, and our Premium subscribers get unlimited use of Auto Prep. Users on our free plan can try Auto Prep (fully-featured) for one doctor visit.