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 changing into extra crowded.
Abridge gives ambient note-taking, which is a synthetic 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 report.
The note-taking software can be multilingual; it might report 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, mentioned in an interview with PYMNTS. “Synthetic intelligence has gotten to the purpose now the place it might 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 will probably be included into athenaOne, which is Athenahealth’s flagship cloud-based digital well being report (EHR), apply 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 medical summaries that may be built-in into digital well being information.
Microsoft is utilizing the expertise from Nuance, which it acquired in 2022. Brient mentioned Nuance was once the one sport 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 without doubt 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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Notice-Taking to Prognosis and Digital Name Facilities
Brient mentioned the Abridge partnership represents one a part of Athenahealth’s broader imaginative and prescient for AI in healthcare expertise. The corporate is creating a platform the place customers get to customise their expertise.
For instance, Abridge is one in all 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 present physicians a selection on which note-taking service they wish to use as a result of everybody’s type is completely different.
Letting every doctor in a apply select the mannequin that works finest for them is a “far more versatile technique,” he added. “We have been fairly excited concerning the method, and tremendous excited to have Abridge be a part of that method.”
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 report system, Brient mentioned.
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 mentioned.
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 loads of paperwork are in varied kinds: lab take a look at faxes, medical kinds, and the like.
“Lots of the information coming into the EHR is unstructured. We get loads of faxes,” Brient mentioned. “You’re coping with loads of distributors far and wide.”
He added that “the advantage of AI is it might truly learn these faxes. It might probably pull all the information out and put them in discrete kind,” or saved in a method for straightforward retrieval and evaluation. So as an alternative of the physician having to learn every particular person lab take a look at, AI can consolidate and analyze them.
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Different AI Use Instances
Brient additionally sees AI making its income cycle administration companies extra environment friendly. This consists of managing billing, insurance coverage claims and funds. “We will add agentic AI and the brand new LLMs [large language models] to do loads of the work the people are doing, which speeds it up.”
For instance, a hospital will get a verify from an insurance coverage firm however it doesn’t say for whom or why, Brient mentioned. The hospital has to analyze by logging into the insurer’s net 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 cellphone calls, scheduling appointments, refilling remedy and the like.
AI will deal with the routine duties to assist the human employee who may be overwhelmed making an attempt to verify folks out and in of the clinic, he mentioned.
“Huge well being methods are already doing that, however most of our purchasers are small, unbiased practices,” Brient added. “So we’re serving to them, over the following 12 months, to start out doing that.”
He mentioned 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 take a look at for his or her surgical procedure. Brient can see Athenahealth appearing as a “digital name heart” for docs’ places of work.
Adoption might enhance as prices proceed to fall. Brient mentioned 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 maintain declining.
“Folks have lengthy joked that Dr. Google performs a giant function in folks’s healthcare lives,” he mentioned. “I can think about that Dr. ChatGPT will begin to play a giant function in folks’s healthcare lives, formally or unofficially.”
