Athenahealth is partnering with Abridge to combine the corporate’s enhanced note-taking expertise into its platform for clinicians, as the marketplace for ambient scribing is turning into extra crowded.
Abridge affords ambient note-taking, which is a man-made intelligence (AI)-powered expertise that listens to a affected person and physician dialog and generates structured medical notes. After a evaluate by the physician, these notes are added on to a affected person’s digital well being file.
The note-taking software can be multilingual; it might probably file the patient-doctor dialog in a single language and write it up in one other language.
“Writing notes is one thing that has been a ache level for physicians since time started,” Paul Brient, chief product officer at Athenahealth, stated in an interview with PYMNTS. “Synthetic intelligence has gotten to the purpose now the place it might probably take heed to a provider-patient dialog and generate a observe for the doctor.”
Physicians typically spend hours of their private time catching up on medical notes — a phenomenon the trade calls “pajama time.”
Abridge’s expertise might be included into athenaOne, which is Athenahealth’s flagship cloud-based digital well being file (EHR), observe administration and income cycle administration platform designed for outpatient care.
Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered assistant that mixes superior voice dictation and ambient listening with generative AI. Known as Dragon Copilot, the software converts physician and affected person conversations into scientific summaries that may be built-in into digital well being information.
Microsoft is utilizing the expertise from Nuance, which it acquired in 2022. Brient stated Nuance was the one recreation on the town about three to 4 years in the past, however the discipline has gotten crowded now with 40 to 50 distributors.
Athenahealth is likely one of the largest on this market, serving 160,000 suppliers or about 10% of U.S. healthcare suppliers, primarily in outpatient care.
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Be aware-Taking to Prognosis and Digital Name Facilities
Brient stated the Abridge partnership represents one a part of Athenahealth’s broader imaginative and prescient for AI in healthcare expertise. The corporate is growing a platform the place customers get to customise their expertise.
For instance, Abridge is one among three note-taking companies being provided on athenaOne. The opposite two are Suki and iScribe, and Athenahealth plans so as to add extra. Brient desires to provide physicians a selection on which note-taking service they need to use as a result of everybody’s model is completely different.
Letting every doctor in a observe select the mannequin that works finest for them is a “far more versatile technique,” he added. “We had been fairly excited concerning the strategy, and tremendous excited to have Abridge be a part of that strategy.”
Athenahealth additionally has an app market with greater than 850 APIs for physicians to customise their tech expertise.
Trying forward, the arrival of generative and agentic AI can “dramatically change the clinician expertise” within the realm of the digital well being file system, Brient stated.
First, the note-taking AI can evolve right into a expertise that may pull out diagnoses from the patient-doctor dialog and even counsel medication orders, shrinking the method right into a single cognitive step, Brient stated.
Second, Brient sees Athenahealth utilizing AI to digitize outpatient documentation. In contrast to in-patient hospital care, the place all the things is digital, at clinics and different outpatient settings numerous paperwork are in numerous varieties: lab check faxes, medical varieties, and the like.
“Loads of the info coming into the EHR is unstructured. We get numerous faxes,” Brient stated. “You’re coping with numerous distributors all over.”
He added that “the benefit of AI is it might probably really learn these faxes. It will probably pull all the info out and put them in discrete type,” or saved in a approach for simple retrieval and evaluation. So as a substitute of the physician having to learn every particular person lab check, AI can consolidate and analyze them.
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Different AI Use Circumstances
Brient additionally sees AI making its income cycle administration companies extra environment friendly. This consists of managing billing, insurance coverage claims and funds. “We are able to add agentic AI and the brand new LLMs [large language models] to do numerous the work the people are doing, which speeds it up.”
For instance, a hospital will get a verify from an insurance coverage firm nevertheless it doesn’t say for whom or why, Brient stated. The hospital has to research by logging into the insurer’s internet portal. AI brokers can do this.
One other use case is to enchantment protection denials. An LLM can write an enchantment letter that the AI agent can add to the insurer’s portal. The human employee would click on to submit the enchantment.
Additionally, Brient sees AI taking on the communication between the physician’s workplace and the affected person — taking telephone calls, scheduling appointments, refilling treatment and the like.
AI will deal with the routine duties to assist the human employee who may be overwhelmed attempting to verify individuals out and in of the clinic, he stated.
“Massive well being programs are already doing that, however most of our shoppers are small, impartial practices,” Brient added. “So we’re serving to them, over the following yr, to begin doing that.”
He stated he met with an organization that makes use of AI brokers as “nurses,” to not straight present care, however to carry out follow-ups like calling the affected person to remind them they nonetheless must get a sure lab check for his or her surgical procedure. Brient can see Athenahealth performing as a “digital name heart” for docs’ places of work.
Adoption might improve as prices proceed to fall. Brient stated the price for note-taking has fallen from $2,000 a month per physician within the early days to $100 to $400 — and costs nonetheless hold declining.
“Folks have lengthy joked that Dr. Google performs a giant function in individuals’s healthcare lives,” he stated. “I can think about that Dr. ChatGPT will begin to play a giant function in individuals’s healthcare lives, formally or unofficially.”
