What You Missed in Healthcare IT: November Edition

1. More EHR Vendors Roll Out Their AI Scribes

In past months we’ve covered EHR heavyweights Epic and Oracle, with their extensive integrations and comprehensive solutions. This month, we saw several smaller and more specialized EHRs roll out their proprietary or integrated AI ambient scribes.

MEDENT and Azalea Health both opted for an integration with Suki, whereas Veradigm and ModMed—both EHR and practice management solutions—both released their own AI ambient scribe solutions (here and here, respectively).

2. Value-Based Care Gets the Clinician Assistant Treatment

2024 has been the year of the AI ambient scribe, and—more broadly—clinician assistants in general, including summarization tools and point of care clinical decision support. However, as we’ve heard from VBC leaders in the past, tools built for the fee-for-service model don’t necessarily support VBC workflows. This month, we saw more VBC-specific vendors expanding their solutions to the point of care.

• Wellsky, which offers a suite of tools across acute and post-acute care as well as VBC-targeted products, released an AI solution that performs ambient scribing, summarization, and EHR field auto-filling from photos and documents.

• VBC analytics platform i2i Population Health is partnering with CureMD to surface actionable data to providers at the point of care.

• The population health data and analytics platform, Arcadia, launched two new solutions—a tool that leverages CareJourney’s market intelligence to analyze VBC metrics against the market and an analytics engine that delivers custom insights to providers via email. (It’s not exactly at the point of care, but closer!)

3. AI in Patient Intake Grows

Time and again we’ve seen administrative use-cases of AI garner broader adoption than more clinical workflows. This is true in patient intake, too, where AI can generate small but meaningful efficiencies and improve patient experience.

Rogers Behavioral Health, a mental health and addiction services provider, selected Limbic, an AI contact center solution, to assist with patient screening and intake. RevSpring released Forms Blast, which helps providers dynamically deliver digital forms to patients and uses optical character recognition (OCR) to auto-fill patient forms from their ID or other documents.

4. More Health Systems Implement Remote Solutions

While virtual nursing and remote patient monitoring solutions are far from the same, they share one very essential common thread: the de-coupling of treatment and location. This month, we saw even more healthcare providers taking meaningful steps in this direction:

• Sentara Health is implementing the ThinkAndor virtual nursing platform at its Norfolk, VA hospital.

• Florida health system Lee Health is expanding their remote patient monitoring program with Biofourmis and launching an AI hospital at home program.

• Mass General Brigham launched a partnership with the New England Center and Home for Veterans to provide hospital at home services for veterans experiencing homelessness.

• MedStar Health in Maryland expanded its partnership with in-home care provider DispatchHealth to support care transitions.

Perhaps as a predecessor to more implementations to come, The Alliance for Smart Healthcare Excellence—established by care.ai, now a part of Stryker, and developed with assistance from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME)—was established to promote the Smart Hospital Maturity Model (SHMM).

5. Healthcare Tech Experts React to the Election

Beyond the potential far-reaching effects of a second Trump presidency on healthcare policy generally, a regime change at this pivotal moment in healthcare tech, could have meaningful impacts across the industry. Obviously, headline-making picks like Dr. Oz for CMS and RFK, Jr. for HHS have generated significant conjecture, but there are also more narrow and concrete policies that could quite quickly change under a new administration.

For example, Fierce Healthcare reported on the potential implications of conservative think tank Paragon Health Institute shaping AI policy, particularly reflecting on a paper advocating reducing human-in-the-loop AI implementations in favor of purely AI driven solutions. Brendan Keeler also shared a quick post about what the new administration could mean for ONC, now ASTP, and interoperability efforts in healthcare (comment section is worth a read).

Other Resources You May Have Missed

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

• Navigating Epic’s AI Market Impact: Opportunities and Threats

• AI Autonomous Medical Coding Buyer’s Guide

• This month’s market maps: AI inpatient risk monitoring, scheduling optimization, real time location systems, and provider utilization review.

• This month’s conversations with healthcare leaders:

  • Lynn Simon of Community Health Systems

  • Anna Taylor of MultiCare Connected Care

  • Dhruv Vasishtha of 25 Madison Health