Attendees at HIMSS in Orlando, Florida 2024.
Courtesy of HIMSS
The most well liked recent technology for doctors guarantees to bring back an age-old health-care practice: face-to-face conversations with patients.
As greater than 30,000 health and tech professionals gathered among the many palm trees on the HIMSS conference in Orlando, Florida, this week, ambient clinical documentation was the talk of the exhibition floor.
This technology allows doctors to consensually record their visits with patients. The conversations are mechanically transformed into clinical notes and summaries using artificial intelligence. Corporations like Microsoft’s Nuance Communications, Abridge and Suki have developed solutions with these capabilities, which they argue will help reduce doctors’ administrative workloads and prioritize meaningful connections with patients.
“After I see a patient, I actually have to put in writing notes, I actually have to position orders, I actually have to think concerning the patient summary,” Dr. Shiv Rao, founder and CEO of Abridge, told CNBC at HIMSS. “So what our technology does is it allows me to deal with the person in front of me — crucial person, the patient — because once I hit start, have a conversation, then hit stop, I can swivel my chair and inside seconds, the note’s there.”
Administrative workloads are a significant problem for clinicians across the U.S. health-care system. A survey published by Athenahealth in February found that greater than 90% of physicians report feeling burned out on a “regular basis,” largely due to the paperwork they’re expected to finish.
Greater than 60% of doctors said they feel overwhelmed by clerical requirements and work a median of 15 hours per week outside their normal hours to maintain up, the survey said. Many within the industry call this at-home work “pajama time.”
Since administrative work is generally bureaucratic and doesn’t directly influence doctors’ decisions around diagnoses or patient care, it has served as one among the primary areas where health systems have seriously begun to explore applications of generative AI. Consequently, ambient clinical documentation solutions are having an actual moment within the sun.
“There’s not a greater place to be,” Kenneth Harper, general manager of DAX Copilot at Microsoft, told CNBC in an interview.
Microsoft’s Nuance announced its ambient clinical documentation tool Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express in a preview capability last March. By September, the answer, now called DAX Copilot, was generally available. Harper said there at the moment are greater than 200 organizations using the technology.
Microsoft acquired Nuance for around $16 billion in 2021. The corporate had a two-story exhibition booth within the exhibit hall that was often filled with attendees
Harper said the technology saves doctors several minutes per encounter, though the precise numbers vary depending on the specialty. He said his team gets feedback concerning the service almost every day from doctors who claim it has helped them take higher care of themselves — and even saved their marriages.
Harper recounted a conversation with one physician who was considering retirement after practicing for greater than three a long time. He said the doctor was feeling worn out from years of stress, but he was inspired to maintain working after he was introduced to DAX Copilot.
“He said, ‘I literally think I will practice for an additional 10 years because I actually enjoy what I do,'” Harper said. “That is just a private anecdote of the sort of impact that is having on our care teams.”
At HIMSS, Stanford Health Care announced it’s deploying DAX Copilot across its entire enterprise.
Gary Fritz, chief of applications at Stanford Health Care, said the organization had initially began by testing the tool inside its exam rooms. He said Stanford recently surveyed physicians about their use of DAX Copilot and 96% found it easy to make use of.
“I do not know that I’ve ever seen that big a number,” Fritz told CNBC in an interview. “It’s an enormous deal.”
Dr. Christopher Sharp, chief medical information officer at Stanford Health Care and one among the physicians who tested DAX Copilot, said it’s “remarkably seamless” to make use of. He said the tool’s immediacy and reliability are accurate and robust but could improve at capturing a patient’s tone.
Sharp said he thinks the tool saves him documentation time and has modified how he spends that point. He said he is usually reading and editing notes as an alternative of composing them, as an illustration, so it shouldn’t be as if the work has disappeared entirely.
Within the near term, Sharp said he’d wish to see more capabilities for personalization inside DAX Copilot, each at a person and specialty level. Even so, he said it was easy to see the worth of it from the beginning.
“The moment that that first document returns to you, and also you see your individual words and the patient’s own words being reflected directly back to you in a usable fashion, I might say that from that moment, you are hooked,” Sharp told CNBC in an interview.
Fritz said it continues to be early within the product life cycle, and Stanford Health Care continues to be figuring out exactly what deployment will seem like. He said DAX Copilot will likely roll out in specialty-specific tranches.
Attendees at HIMSS in Orlando, Florida 2024.
Courtesy of HIMSS
In January, Nuance announced the final availability of DAX Copilot inside Epic Systems’ electronic health record (EHR). Most doctors create and manage patient medical records using EHRs, and Epic is the largest vendor by hospital market share within the U.S., in keeping with a May report from KLAS Research.
Integrating a tool like DAX Copilot directly into doctors’ EHR workflow means they will not need to modify apps to access it, which helps save time and reduce their clerical burden even further, Harper said.
Seth Hain, senior vp of R&D at Epic, told CNBC that greater than 150,000 notes have been drafted into the corporate’s software by ambient technologies for the reason that HIMSS conference last yr. And the technology is scaling fast. Hain said more notes have already been drafted in 2024 than in 2023.
“You are seeing health systems who’ve worked through an intentional means of acclimating their end users to any such technology, now starting to rapidly roll that out,” he said.
An organization named Abridge also integrates its ambient clinical documentation technology directly inside Epic. Abridge declined to share the precise variety of health organizations using its technology. It announced at HIMSS that California-based UCI Health is rolling out the corporate’s solution system-wide.
Rao, the CEO of Abridge, said the speed at which the health-care industry has adopted ambient clinical documentation feels “historic.”
Abridge announced a $30 million Series B funding round in October, led by Spark Capital, and 4 months later, the corporate closed a $150 million Series C round, in keeping with a February release. Rao said tail winds like physician burnout have was a “tornado” for Abridge, and it would use these funds to proceed to take a position within the science behind the technology and explore where it may go next.
The corporate is saving some doctors as much as three hours a day, Rao said, and is automating greater than 92% of the clerical work it focuses on. Abridge’s technology is live across 55 specialties and 14 languages, he added.
Abridge has a Slack channel called “love stories,” which was viewed by CNBC, where the team will share the positive feedback they get about their technology. One message from this week was from a physician who said Abridge helped them take their least favorite a part of their job away and saves them around an hour and a half every day.
“That is the sort of feedback that absolutely inspires everybody in the corporate,” Rao said.
Suki CEO Punit Soni said the ambient clinical documentation market is “sizzling.” He expects rapid growth to proceed through the subsequent couple of years, though, like all hype cycles, he said he thinks the dust will settle.
Soni founded Suki greater than six years ago after hypothesizing that there could be a necessity for a digital assistant to assist doctors manage clinical documentation. Soni said Suki is now utilized by greater than 30 specialties in around 250 health organizations nationwide. Six “large health systems” have gone live with Suki prior to now two weeks, he added.
“For 4 to 5 years I’ve sat around, mainly with the shop open, hoping anyone will show up. Now the complete mall is here, and there is a line outside the door of individuals wanting to deploy, ” Soni told CNBC at HIMSS. “It’s extremely, very exciting to be here.”
Suki’s website says its technology can reduce the time a physician spends on documentation by a median of 72%. The corporate raised a $55 million funding round in 2021 led by March Capital. It’ll likely raise one other round within the latter half of the yr, Soni said.
Soni said Suki is concentrated on deploying its technology at scale and exploring additional applications, like how ambient documentation could possibly be used to help nurses. He said the Spanish language is coming to Suki soon, and customers should expect most major languages to follow.
“There may be a lot that has to occur,” he said. “In the subsequent decade, all of health-care tech goes to look completely different.”