The CEOs of Nabla, Suki, Ambience Healthcare and Abridge separately spoke with MedCity News about why their products have staying power despite imminent competition from Epic.
Startups in the ambient documentation space are moving beyond simple scribing to tools that can handle tasks like intake, coding and care coordination, according to Heidi Health CEO Tom Kelly. Standing out in this crowded market is a challenge, and companies’ success will hinge on creating products clinicians actually want to use, he added.
In a landscape where complexity has long been the norm, the power of one lies not just in unification, but in intelligence and automation.
What clinicians really need today is comprehensive support to offload routine tasks. They need intelligent systems that can proactively highlight relevant patient history before appointments, flag care gaps, and automatically queue up appropriate screening reminders or preventive care protocols.
Ambience Healthcare closed a $243 million Series C funding round, bringing its valuation to $1.25 billion. The startup, which offers an AI-powered platform for clinical documentation and coding, aims to reduce clinician burnout by automating time-consuming administrative tasks across a wide range of specialties.
The widespread investment in AI furthers economists’ optimism about a “roaring 20’s” of worker productivity on the horizon. However, this will not take place in health care without accompanying systemic and organizational actions that rethink what we financially incentivize, how we integrate new technologies, how we shift tasks, and how we prepare the workforce.
Over the past couple of years, ambient scribes have earned widespread adoption among health systems. While there's excitement around other categories like AI agents, no other AI use case has achieved ambient scribes’ level of traction, noted Daniel Yang, Kaiser Permanente’s vice president of AI and emerging technologies.
In an interview, Munich Re Specialty Senior Vice President Jim Craig talked about the risk that accompanies innovation and the important role that insurers play.
To scale clinical AI, vendors must design tools that feel natural and personalized to each doctor — otherwise, clinicians won’t use them, said Heidi Health CEO Tom Kelly. In the crowded AI scribe market, he believes that clinician adoption rates, not flashy integration or deployment speeds, are the true measure of success.
AI-powered scribes are proving their ability to dramatically reduce clinician burnout, but their financial impact is unclear, according to research from the Peterson Health Technology Institute.
Just as Google and Amazon expanded far beyond their initial offerings, successful healthcare AI companies must evolve into comprehensive platforms that address both clinical and operational challenges.
By reducing the time spent on administrative tasks, AI scribes allow physicians to focus more on what truly matters — patient care. As the technology continues to evolve and improve, its adoption will likely become more widespread, further enhancing its benefits.
AI-native tax firm Gelt combines top human tax experts with AI to help physicians and healthcare practices use data-driven tax strategies to lower liabilities, improve profitability, and future-proof their finances.
Lavonia Thomas, nursing informatics officer at MD Anderson Cancer Center, hopes that nurses will gain more access to ambient listening tools that listen in on patient conversations and then generate summaries for documentation purposes. These AI tools have become popular among physicians in the past couple years.
AI-powered documentation tools have proven successful in alleviating clinicians’ administrative burden and burnout. As these tools continue to evolve, healthcare leaders want to see more tech that can help surface the right data at the right time, as well as tools that can help speed up billing processes.
By insisting on coding-aware AI solutions, health systems can ensure that these technologies fulfill their transformative promise, reducing clinician burnout and administrative burden, improving patient care and communication, and accurately capturing what occurred during an encounter.
Idaho-based health system St. Luke’s is rolling out Ambience Healthcare’s AI platform across its enterprise following a successful pilot. The AI-powered scribing tool decreased clinicians’ documentation time by 39%.
AI solutions baked into the EHR experience could radically transform the clinical effectiveness of physicians by leveraging the richness of the longitudinal patient record, while also creating efficiencies that give them back more time to care and create more revenue.