Author: Zach Winn | MIT News<\/p>\n
Most doctors go into medicine\u00a0because they want to help patients. But today\u2019s health care system requires that doctors spend hours each day on other work \u2014 searching through electronic health records (EHRs), writing documentation, coding and billing, prior authorization, and utilization management\u00a0\u2014 often surpassing the time they spend caring for patients. The situation leads to physician burnout, administrative inefficiencies, and worse overall care for patients.<\/p>\n
Ambience Healthcare is working to change that with an AI-powered platform that automates routine\u00a0tasks for clinicians before, during, and after patient visits.<\/p>\n
“We build co-pilots to give clinicians AI superpowers,” says Ambience CEO Mike Ng MBA \u201916, who co-founded the company with Nikhil Buduma \u201917. “Our platform is embedded directly into\u00a0EHRs to free up clinicians to\u00a0focus on what matters most, which is providing the best possible patient care.”<\/p>\n
Ambience\u2019s suite of products handles pre-charting and real-time AI scribing, and assists with navigating the thousands of rules to select the right insurance billing codes. The platform can also send after-visit summaries to patients and their families in different languages to keep everyone informed and on the same page.<\/p>\n
Ambience is already being used across roughly 40 large institutions such as UCSF Health, the Memorial Hermann Health System, St. Luke\u2019s Health System, John Muir Health, and more.\u00a0Clinicians leverage Ambience in dozens of languages and more than\u00a0100 specialties and subspecialties, in settings\u00a0like the emergency department, hospital inpatient settings,\u00a0and the oncology ward.<\/p>\n
The founders say clinicians using Ambience save two to three hours per day on documentation,\u00a0report lower levels of burnout, and develop higher-quality relationships with their patients.<\/p>\n
From problem to product to platform<\/strong><\/p>\n Ng worked in finance until getting an up-close look at the health care system after he fractured his back in 2012. He was initially misdiagnosed and put on the wrong care plan, but he learned a lot about the U.S. health system in the process, including how the majority of clinicians\u2019 days are spent documenting visits, selecting billing codes, and completing other administrative tasks. The average clinician only spends 27 percent of their time on direct patient care.<\/p>\n In 2014, Ng decided to enter the MIT Sloan School of Management. During his first week, he attended the \u201ct=0\u201d celebration of entrepreneurship hosted by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, where he met Buduma.\u00a0The pair became fast friends, and they ended up taking classes together including 15.378 (Building an Entrepreneurial Venture) and 15.392 (Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures).<\/p>\n \u201cMIT was an incredible training ground to evaluate what makes a great company and learn the foundations of building a successful company,\u201d Ng says.<\/p>\n Buduma had gone through his own journey to discover problems with the health care system. After immigrating to the U.S. from India as a child and battling persistent health issues, he had watched his parents struggle to navigate the U.S. medical\u00a0system. While completing his bachelor\u2019s degree at MIT, he was also steeped in the AI research community and wrote an early textbook on modern AI and deep learning.<\/p>\n In 2016, Ng and Buduma\u00a0founded\u00a0their first company in San Francisco \u2014 Remedy Health \u2014 which operated its own AI-powered health care platform. In the process of hiring clinicians, taking care of patients, and implementing technology themselves, they developed an even deeper appreciation for the challenges that health care organizations face.<\/p>\n During that time, they also\u00a0got an inside look at advances in AI. Google\u2019s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, a major investor in Remedy and now in Ambience, led a research group inside of Google Brain to invent the transformer architecture. Ng and Buduma say they were among the first to put transformers into production to support their own clinicians at Remedy. Subsequently, several of their friends and housemates went on to start the large language model group within OpenAI. Their friends\u2019 work formed the research foundations that ultimately led to ChatGPT.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very clear that we were at this inflection point where we were going to have this class of general-purpose models that were going to get exponentially better,\u201d Buduma says. \u201cBut I think we also noticed a big gap between those general-purpose models versus what actually would be robust enough to work in a clinic. Mike and I decided in 2020 that there should be a team that specifically focused on fine-tuning these models for health\u00a0care and medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n The founders started Ambience by building an AI-powered scribe that works on phones and laptops to record the details of doctor-patient visits in a HIPAA-compliant system that preserves patient privacy. They quickly saw that the models needed to be fine-tuned for each area\u00a0of medicine, and they slowly expanded specialty coverage one by one in a multiyear process.<\/p>\n The founders also realized their scribes needed to fit within back-office operations like insurance coding and billing.<\/p>\n \u201cDocumentation isn\u2019t just for the clinician, it’s also for the revenue cycle team,\u201d Buduma says. \u201cWe had to go back and rewrite all of our algorithms to be coding-aware. There are literally tens of thousands of coding rules that change every year and differ by specialty and contract type.\u201d<\/p>\n From there, the founders built out models for clinicians to make referrals and to send comprehensive summaries of visits to patients.<\/p>\n \u201cIn most care settings before Ambience, when a patient and their family left the clinic, whatever the patient and their family wrote down was what they remembered from the visit,\u201d Buduma says. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the features that physicians love most, because they are trying to create the best experience for patients and their families. By the time that patient is in the parking lot, they already have a really robust, high-quality summary of exactly what you talked about and all the shared decision-making around your visit in their portal.\u201d<\/p>\n Democratizing health care<\/strong><\/p>\n By improving physician productivity, the founders believe they\u2019re helping the health care\u00a0system manage a chronic shortage of clinicians that\u2019s expected to grow in coming years.<\/p>\n \u201cIn health care, access is still a huge problem,\u201d Ng says. \u201cRural Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of preventable hospitalization, and half of that is attributed to a lack of access to specialty care.\u201d<\/p>\n With Ambience already helping health systems manage razor-thin margins by streamlining administrative tasks,\u00a0the founders have a longer-term vision to help\u00a0increase access to the best clinical information across the country.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a really exciting opportunity to make expertise at some of the major academic medical centers more democratized across the U.S.,\u201d Ng\u00a0says. \u201cRight now, there\u2019s just not enough specialists in the U.S. to support our rural populations. We hope to help scale the knowledge of the leading specialists in the country through an AI infrastructure layer, especially as these models become more clinically intelligent.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"