What You Missed in Healthcare IT: August Edition

1. Epic Was Everywhere in August

Support for TEFCA

Epic made news with an update allowing users to securely release their healthcare information to apps of their choice. The change represents a major stride forward for the government’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) that Epic is helping to support.

While the update isn’t technologically earth-shattering for Epic, which already has fairly accessible API endpoints, it may help push other EHRs to take similar steps and push forward the adoption of the individual access services purpose of use, one of the major goals of TEFCA. (For more background on TEFCA, see our primer)

Integration Updates

Six products announced new or improved Epic integrations in both Epic’s Toolbox and Workshop. It’s interesting to see more vendors achieve these designations following the launch of Showroom (its App Market successor) earlier this year.

• Nym, Codametrix, and Solventum announced they were recognized as Toolbox-designated in the fully autonomous coding category. (Fathom is the fourth and final vendor in this Epic Toolbox category, though we couldn’t find any news on when they were recognized.)

• Talkdesk’s Copilot deepened its integration with the EHR vendor’s customer relationship management platform, Cheers, giving agents a unified experience.

• Press Ganey and Qualtrics both announced deeper integrations (here and here, respectively) allowing provider organizations to both capture and act on patient surveys directly in Epic’s MyChart.

Users Group Meeting @ Epic HQ

Of course, we can’t leave out that Epic HQ was also the place to be with UGM taking place. This article gives a nice roundup of the major announcements. One in particular stuck out to us: Epic stated that they’re working on over 100 AI projects. While not a surprise given how much they’ve been talking about AI use cases, it will be interesting to see the implications on AI-driven vendors who are looking to build solutions that overlap with Epic’s roadmap.

In case you want to dig deeper, here are a few other takes we found interesting: Part three of AvoMD co-founder and CEO Yair Saperstein’s posts, Brendan Keeler’s post and Dayton Children’s Hospital’s J.D. Whitlock’s Pulse article.

2. AI Ambient Scribes Are Going Mainstream

AI ambient scribes aren’t going anywhere any time soon; the big news, though, is that we’re seeing health systems move beyond pilots into enterprise-wide implementations.

• Kaiser Permanente went live with Abridge following a year of testing and implementation work.

• Reid Health rolled out Abridge to all clinicians following a pilot that found clinicians were able to spend 60 percent less time on after hours documentation.

• Ochsner Health announced an enterprise-wide agreement with DeepScribe.

• Ascension Saint Thomas announced Suki would be available to its 700-plus clinicians as well as second- and third-year residents with the goal of eventually rolling out to all residents.

• Northwestern Medicine is launching Nuance DAX enterprise-wide.

We also saw one of the first examples of an EHR company building its own native AI ambient scribe, with Elation Health releasing its Note Assist product. We’ll be interested to see whether more EHRs go down the “build” path, rather than partnering with an existing vendor to deliver the capability.

3. Digital Front Door Tools Keep Getting Smarter

Vendors are increasingly engaging patients directly with AI agents, despite the fact that consumers are more comfortable with clinical use-cases than AI call center tools. To whit:

• Fair Square Medicare released a suite of AI contact center intelligence and agent assist solutions, called Vox, for plan enrollment.

• MUSC Health is leveraging SoundHound’s conversational chat agent to manage appointments and answer patient questions.

• Weave, the patient engagement and payments platform, released an update that integrates patient payment reminders.

• NRC Health released a suite of new AI products for capturing feedback and improving responses.

Only time will tell whether the cost savings offered by AI will spell success for AI contact center and patient engagement vendors, or if patient preferences will win out.

4. The Front-End of the Rev Cycle is Going Automated

So far, we’ve seen AI-enabled coding make strides in adoption, but we’re excited to see more innovation on the front-end of the rev cycle. While benefits verification and prior auth tools can likewise help improve eventual payouts, they also have a beneficial impact on employee workflows and patient experience, allowing patients to be seen more quickly.

• Infinitus, the AI-powered benefits and prior auth solution, released a new instant benefits verification tool for commercial insurance patients seeking specialty medication.

• Opkit released its human-in-the-loop GenAI calling platform, which handles payer-facing calls for insurance verification, claims, and prior authorization.

• Valer and Clearwave are partnering to automate prior authorization submission, status checking, and verification.

Other resources you may have missed

In case you missed it, here’s a quick roundup of other resources we shared this month:

• The State of AI in RCM 2024 Report

• This month’s market maps: Price Transparency, Patient Price Estimation, Point of Care Clinical Decision Support, and AI Inbox Management

• This month’s conversations with healthcare leaders: Daniel Guerra of ChenMed, Keith Morse of Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, and Justin Brueck of Endeavor Health.