Kaiser Permanente Launches Abridge AI Documentation Tool

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Brief description of the dive:

Kaiser Permanente Implements AI-Based Clinical Documentation Tool Abridge said Wednesday that its goal is to reduce administrative work for doctors.
The product, which records patient conversations and summarizes important medical details, is now available to doctors at 40 nonprofit hospitals and more than 600 medical practices in eight states and Washington, D.C.
Kaiser rolled out the tool after testing and quality checks, including reviews by more than 1,000 physicians across all markets, a spokesman said. The product also requires patient consent for use, and physicians will review notes before they are entered into medical records, according to a press release.

Diving Insight:

Clinical documentation is a popular use case for generative AI, technology that can be used to create new content, such as text or images, in healthcare.

Several other companies have created products to help healthcare providers take notes during patient visits, including Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft-owned Nuance Communications.

Augmedix, another AI-powered clinical records company, recently struck a deal to be acquired and privatized by health data company Commure for about $139 million.

There’s also a lot of investor interest in AI startups. Abridge, founded in 2018, raised $150 million earlier this year.

The company has also rolled out its documentation tool to other health systems. This year, Abridge announced partnerships with hospital operators including Sutter Health, University of Vermont Health Network, MemorialCare and UCI Health.

The technology’s creators say AI note-taking assistants can help doctors reduce their documentation burden — a long-standing problem for providers who admit to spending significant time taking clinical notes and other administrative work, sometimes beyond work hours.

Doctors say that’s also a challenge for patients. Nearly three-quarters of health care workers say the time or effort it takes to complete clinical documentation complicates patient care, according to a study published earlier this summer by the American Medical Informatics Association.

Kaiser’s latest AI implementation comes as technology developers, vendors, regulators and lawmakers grapple with the question of how to safely and ethically implement AI in the healthcare sector.

Experts say implementing too quickly could risk errors or increase bias, potentially worsening health equity.

The federal government has noticed, too. HHS recently underwent a major overhaul of its technology functions, assigning AI oversight to the newly renamed Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.