Elion’s 2024 Debrief
Each week, we here at Elion track the latest healthcare IT news, from product announcements to M&A activity and implementations ranging from modestly sized pilots to enterprise-wide rollouts across the nation’s largest health systems.
We also take deeper dives into areas of rapid innovation where AI is shifting the vendor landscape. Here we’re rounding up the biggest headlines and insights we covered this year—along with a few of our own product rollouts—all broken down by the numbers.
1. 2024 was officially the year of the AI ambient scribe.
This category has ballooned to a whopping 62 vendors as of press time, including new rollouts from niche EHRs, practice management solutions, and specialty-specific vendors within even the last month.
AI ambient scribes were also the single highest-viewed category within our vendor database. The top-viewed AI scribe this year was Ambience Healthcare, followed by Nabla, Abridge, and Nuance DAX in that order.
Our indicators show that buyers are still strongly considering their options in this space, as our January 2024 Buyer’s Guide to AI Scribes remains our most-visited resource.
2. The award for most prolific category goes to…
Despite the competition, a few vendors stood out…
In addition to doubling down on the government’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA)—announcing all customers would be live by 2025—Epic also previewed a host of planned AI features. Check out our analysis on these features and Epic’s AI strategy here.
Epic also got into a bit of a legal spat with Particle. We broke down everything you need to know here with help from our friend Brendan Keeler.
It was nice to hear some big updates from Oracle as well.
Amongst digital health startups, these API-first EHRs were incredibly popular as a way to customize patient and clinician experience, and integrate with other parts of their tech stacks; we broke down this market in more detail here.
3. AI RCM felt like a “safer” bet for many healthcare leaders
While clinical-facing AI products are often talked about, revenue-focused AI products are seeing the most demand and uptake.
There seems to be much more apprehension around clinical use cases. According to an in-depth analysis by Flare Capital, despite almost 50% of health system AI funding going toward clinical use cases, “clinical decision support solutions have yielded amongst the lowest maturity rates amongst all health system AI startups (6.8%) while imaging AI solutions have fared slightly better with a 9.9% maturity rate.” Financial, patient engagement, and operations startups have had better returns, they found.
Within AI RCM, AI denials management and AI prior auth are both the two largest categories and the most visited. Clinical documentation integrity (CDI) is also a big focus for folks browsing our database. AI CDI and conventional CDI both rank in our top 10 most-viewed categories. We also saw lots of buyer curiosity around Autonomous Coding, which we released a buyer’s guide and webinar to cover.
Feel free to check out the report here.
4. Oh yeah…and the Elion marketplace got some big upgrades!
This year we rolled out a taxonomy feature that allows you to see how sub categories fit within parent categories.
And dynamic market maps—so whether you’re exploring potential vendors or putting the finishing touches on a killer LinkedIn post, you can dynamically create a visual market map of any healthcare IT market.
So thank you!
Whether you’ve been here since January 1 or just tagged along, thank you for choosing to follow, learn, and explore alongside us.