Point-of-Care Clinical Decision Support Market Map: The doctor('s AI assistant) will see you now
This is part of Elion’s weekly market map series where we break down critical vendor categories and the key players in them. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.
With clinician burnout at an all-time high in recent years and an impending physician shortage, health systems and software vendors are scrambling to support physicians in providing better care in less time. It follows, then, that clinician assistant products are some of the most popular AI applications we see, as measured by deals signed, investments made, and overall product innovation.
Broadly speaking, AI clinician assistants or copilots, leverage artificial intelligence to help clinicians be more prepared, interact more effectively with the patient, and make better decisions around patient care from intake and pre-charting, through the patient visit or during patient care, diagnosis, and the care plan.
Point-of-care clinical decision support (CDS) solutions, specifically, are tools that help clinicians make evidence-based decisions at the point of care to reduce medical errors, improve patient outcomes, and increase provider efficiency. Some tasks they might complete include auto-drafting clinical notes, managing complex dosage calculations, and providing preliminary and differential diagnoses, as well as helping generate relevant recommendations and care plans.
The History of CDS
In their early days, point-of-care CDS solutions were focused on aggregating hard-coded rules from companies like UpToDate or DynaMed to apply evidence-based medicine during patient interactions. These systems helped trigger reminders for clinicians, surfaced potential diagnoses and recommendations, or even just calculated correct dosage for medications.
But capabilities for point-of-care CDS tools increased dramatically with the advent of LLMs and GenAI, which enable more advanced reasoning on unstructured patient data. These models are trained on the vast literature of medical guidelines and clinical best practices. So, after they extract key clinical information for the patient, including symptoms, patient history, medications, and examination findings, they’re able to produce a list of potential differential diagnoses as well as formulated clinical plans customized to the patient.
It’s also worth noting that while early AI entrants focused narrowly on particular use-cases—like AI scribes, clinical summarization, and clinical decision support—health systems seem to prefer platforms over point solutions, and vendors are responding. AI clinician assistant vendors initially focused on one specific use case are starting to branch out into other parts of the workflow, and we expect some degree of convergence into generalized clinical assistant platforms.
Vendor Landscape
While there are many solutions that use a rules-based paradigm to make clinical recommendations within or outside of the EHR, some of the AI-native vendors in this landscape include AvoMD, Corti, Evidently CDS, Glass Health, Kahun, Mariana AI, Pieces, Regard, SmarterDx, and Sully.ai. We’re seeing many AI scribe vendors start to build this functionality as well, and expect to list them in this category soon.
Looking Forward with Point-of-Care CDS
Given what we’ve seen with ambient scribes—a market rapidly moving towards commoditization, with a few products differentiated by their custom models and integrations—we have to wonder if the same thing will happen for point-of-care CDS tools. Both categories of products are driven largely by innovation in machine learning, but there is more product and design required for great CDS tooling, especially when it comes to transparency of results and links to underlying documentation and evidence.
It’s a harder category to build for, but it shares much of the workflow with ambient scribes; our natural conclusion here is that these two types of products will eventually merge and every point-of-care CDS solution will also be an ambient scribe, and leading ambient scribes will set themselves apart with the quality of their AI point-of-care CDS tooling.