Athenahealth associates with Shorten Integrating the company’s improved notes technology into its platform for clinicians, because the ambient scribage market is becoming more and more congested.
Abridge offers an ambient notes, which is a technology supplied by artificial intelligence (AI) which listens to a patient and doctor Conversation and generates structured medical notes. After an examination of the doctor, these notes are added directly to the patient’s electronic health file.
The note taking tool is also multilingual; He can record the patient’s conversation in one language and write it in another language.
“Writing notes is something that has been a point of pain for doctors from the start,” Paul Briendsaid the product director at Athenahealth, in an interview with Pymnts. “Artificial intelligence has come to the point where it can listen to a conversation of a patient supplier and generate a note for the doctor.”
Doctors often spend hours staff time catch up with medical notes – a phenomenon industry calls “Pays time.”
Abridge technology will be integrated into athenaonewhich is the flagship electronic health file based on the cloud of Athenahealth (DSE), the management of the practice And Income cycle management platform designed for ambulatory care.
Earlier this week, Microsoft revealed An assistant powered by AI who combines the dictation of advanced voice and the ambient listening with a generative AI. Called Dragon co -pilotThe tool converts the conversations of doctors and patients in clinical summaries which can be integrated into electronic health files.
Microsoft uses technology Shadethat he acquired in 2022. Briend said that nuance was the only match in town about three to four years ago, but the land has now become congested with 40 to 50 sellers.
Athenahealth is one of the largest in this market, serving 160,000 suppliers, or around 10% of American health care providers, mainly in ambulatory care.
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Taking diagnostic notes and virtual call centers
Briend said that the Abridge partnership represents part of Athenahealth’s broader vision for AI in health care technology. The company develops a platform where users get has Personalize their experience.
For example, Abridge is one of the three notes services be offered on Athenaone. The other two are Suki And be registeredAnd Athenahealth plans to add more. The Brient wants to give doctors a choice on the notes taking service that they want to use because everyone’s style is different.
Let each doctor in a practice choose the model that suits them best is a “much more flexible strategy,” he added. “We were quite excited by the approach, And super excited to have Abridge to join this approach. »»
Athenahealth also has an application market with more than 850 APIs for doctors to personalize their technological experience.
For the future, the arrival of the generator and agentic AI can “considerably change the clinician’s experience” in the field of the electronic health file system, said Brient.
First, the AI of taking note can evolve towards a technology that can withdraw diagnoses from the conversation of the doctorate patient and even suggest medication orders, reducing the process in a single cognitive step, said Brief.
Second, the Briend sees Athenahealth using AI to digitize the ambulatory documentation. Unlike hospital hospital care, where everything is electronic, in clinics and other ambulatory parameters, many documents are in various forms: laboratory test fax, medical forms, etc.
“A large part of the data entering the DSE is not structured. We get a lot of fax, ”said Briend. “You are dealing with many sellers everywhere.”
He added that “the right thing about AI is that it can In fact Read these faxes. It can withdraw all data and put it in discreet form ”or stored In A way to recover and analyze easy. So, instead that the doctor had to read each individual Laboratory test, AI can consolidate and analyze them.
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Other cases of use of AI
The Briend is also to make its management services of the cycle of income more effective. This includes invoicing management, insurance complaints And payments. “We can add an agentic AI and the new LLM (large language models) to do a large part of the work that humans do, which accelerates.”
For example, a hospital receives a check from an insurance company, but he does not say for whom or why, said Brief. The hospital must investigate by connecting to the insurer’s web portal. AI agents can do so.
Another case of use consists in calling refusal of coverage. An LLM can write a letter of appeal that the AI agent can download on the insurer’s portal. The human worker would click to submit the call.
Also, the briend sees AI taking control of the communication between the doctor’s office and the patient – making phone calls, planning appointments, filling medication And similar.
The AI will manage routine tasks to help the human worker who could be overwhelmed by trying to check people in and outside the clinic, he said.
“Large health systems are already doing it, but most of our customers are independent small practices,” added Briend. “So we help them, during the next year, start to do it.”
He said that he had met a company that uses AI agents as “nurses”, not directly to provide care, but to do follow -up as calling the patient to remind them that they still need a certain laboratory test for their surgery. The North can see Athenahealth interim As a “virtual call center” for doctors’ offices.
Adoption could increase as costs continue to drop. Briend said that the cost of taking ratings increased from $ 2,000 per month per doctor at the start at $ 100 to $ 400 – and prices continue to drop.
“People have joked for a long time saying that Dr. Google plays a big role in the life of people’s health care,” he said. “I can imagine that Dr. Chatgpt will begin to play a big role in the life of people’s health care, officially or unofficially.”