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Diving brief:
- Corewell Health will deploy Abridge’s artificial intelligence-powered Clinical Documentation Assistant, the Michigan-based health system announced Thursday.
- The tool records conversations between clinicians and patients and then generates a clinical note for review by the provider. Corewell will also use Abridge to write visit summaries for patients, the system says.
- The deployment at Corewell is one of Abridge’s largest health system partnerships, Abridge CEO Shiv Rao told Healthcare Dive. The technology will be available to 4,000 employed physicians and advanced practice providers at 21 hospitals and more than 300 ambulatory and post-acute care sites.
Dive overview:
The documentation tool will be rolled out to suppliers over the next year, Jason Joseph, chief digital and information officer at Corewell, said in an interview.
The health system also wants to expand the product to more clinicians, as it evaluates which specialties and workflows could benefit from it, potentially in areas such as breastfeeding or respiratory therapy, he added.
Abridge’s latest deployment comes as clinical documentation has become a popular use case for AI. Suppliers have long reported spending hours taking notes and other administrative tasks related to electronic health records, which sometimes extend after working hours And siphon time spent on direct patient care.
Tech companies and many health systems say AI could make a dent alleviate the heavy administrative workload of clinicians and prevent provider burnout.
During a 90-day pilot at Corewell, surveyed clinicians spent an average of 2.2 hours per week on documentation after hours, compared to 4.3 hours before the tool was implemented. AI note taking.
Eighty-five percent of those surveyed said they were more satisfied at work and 90% reported a significant increase in the attention they could give to their patients, according to the health system.
“We have placed a lot of emphasis on our caregivers and we know that the demand for health care with the aging population and fewer workers in this field is really going to increase,” Joseph said. “And so here are the kinds of investments that we can make to make this a little bit better and a little more manageable in the long term.”
Corewell will also use Abridge to generate a summary of the patient’s visit, written at an eighth-grade reading level to ensure patients can easily understand their care, according to a press release.
The summary could avoid questions from patients trying to wade through technical details and medical jargon in their patient portals, Rao said. It will also need to be reviewed by a vendor before being finalized.
“Naturally, I might get messages from my patient asking, ‘What was that term?’ I googled it. This sounds scary. I don’t remember you ever saying that,” Rao said. “What we’ve recognized since our existence as a company, since 2018, is that we really need to thread the needle and create value for both end user groups in the room.”
Deployment at Corewell follows multiple new partnerships with the health system for Abridge this year, including a rollout at the Oakland, Calif.-based health system Kaiser Permanente.
But there are many competitors in the AI documentation market, including Microsoft. Nuance Communications, Suki, Amazon, Veradigm And Oracle.
And as AI becomes a increasingly exciting technology For the healthcare industry, experts say leaders will need to be careful when deploying tools, keeping risks related to accuracy and bias at the forefront. Automation administrative and back office tasks are likely safer starting points before products that involve clinical decision-making, experts said at HLTH in October.
Still, when using AI documentation tools, it’s essential that a vendor validates the text before signing it, Joseph said.
“We’re making the human critical in the loop for everything we do with AI in the clinical space,” he said.