AI Clinical Documentation Integrity
AI Clinical Documentation Integrity (CDI) products leverage artificial intelligence to review and evaluate clinical documentation in support of appropriate patient care, billing, and compliance with regulatory requirements.
These solutions can operate at the point of care, ensuring the documentation reflects the patient-clinician conversation and available clinical data, and supports the assigned medical codes. They can also operate post-encounter, between the medical coding and billing steps, to review the documentation against what has been coded and surface suggestions for revenue and quality opportunities. Many of these solutions include built-in functionality to suggest potential diagnoses that may have been missed based on information in the patient record.
While similar in concept to risk adjustment solutions, AI CDI products are predominantly used in a fee-for-service context to ensure more accurate and complete billing and improve care quality.
Product Usage: The product is primarily used for dictating patient notes in both telemedicine and hospital environments, with the AI function capable of transcribing conversations accurately.
Strengths: The product excels in quick and accurate transcription, recognition of names of places and people, and minimal downtime. Audio is saved locally during downtime for later transcription.
Weaknesses: The product does not allow an option to select patient’s pronouns and occasionally misinterprets certain words (a problem referred to as ‘hallucinating’).
Overall Judgment: Despite its flaws, the product is deemed effective, time-saving, and well managed by the company, with excellent customer service and receptive to user feedback.
Product Usage: Ambience, an AI scribe, is integrated with athenahealth and is used for patient consultation and note-taking, enabling the clinicians to focus more on patient care.
Strengths: Ambience records every consultation, automates note-taking, and is a significant time-saver; it takes only a couple of minutes to produce a note that requires minimal editing.
Weaknesses: The system may experience outages, disrupting workflows, and sometimes producing inaccurate medical notes.
Overall Judgment: Despite its weaknesses, Ambience has generally met the company’s key requirements, and the majority of their clinicians appreciate it.
Product Usage: Ambience is used to automatically generate patient notes and summaries during medical consultations, with the ability to integrate directly into EMR systems for seamless entry of patient data.
Strengths: The software’s strengths include high-quality note generation, ease of use, reliability, real-time transcription, and a high degree of accuracy in diagnosis coding; In addition, it has the ability to translate notes into patient-friendly language and integrates smoothly with EMR systems.
Weaknesses: Previously, manually entering diagnoses codes was a notable weakness, but this has been addressed with the introduction of an auto-code feature; Unrequested nutrition advice in notes was another weakness, but regarded by some as a helpful feature.
Overall Judgment: Ambience is highly valued for its efficiency and quality in producing notes during patient visits, significantly reducing the burden of manual data entry and making it a critical tool for the organization.
Product Usage: The reviewer uses Ambience, an AI scribe, to alleviate heavy documentation load in their long term care company.
Strengths: Ambience is highly customizable, has quick setup times, produces high-quality notes, and helps expedite the closure of notes.
Weaknesses: Certain medication names can be misunderstood and chart viewing on mobile devices can be difficult.
Overall Judgment: Despite still being in the pilot phase, the reviewer is satisfied with Ambience, citing its contributions to improved patient and clinician satisfaction.