Dive Brief:
Corewell Health will roll out Abridge’s artificial intelligence-backed clinical documentation assistant, the Michigan-based health system said Thursday.
The tool records conversations between clinicians and patients, and then generates a clinical note for provider review. Corewell will also use Abridge to draft visit summaries for patients, the system said.
The deployment at Corewell is one of Abridge’s largest health system partnerships, Abridge CEO Shiv Rao told Healthcare Dive. The technology will be available to 4,000 employed physicians and advanced practice providers at 21 hospitals and more than 300 outpatient and post-acute locations.
Dive Insight:
The documentation tool will be rolled out to providers over the next year or so, Jason Joseph, chief digital and information officer at Corewell, said in an interview.
The health system is also interested in eventually expanding the product to more clinicians as they evaluate which specialties and workflows could benefit, potentially in areas like nursing or respiratory therapy, he added.
The latest Abridge deployment comes as clinical documentation has become a popular use case for AI. Providers have long reported spending hours on notetaking and other administrative work in electronic health records, sometimes stretching after work hours and siphoning away time spent on direct patient care.
Technology companies and many health systems argue AI could make a dent in clinicians’ heavy administrative workloads and prevent provider burnout.
During a 90-day pilot at Corewell, surveyed clinicians spent an average of 2.2 hours per week on after-hours documentation, down from 4.3 hours before implementing the AI notetaking tool.
Eighty-five percent of respondents said they were more satisfied at work, and 90% reported a significant increase in the amount of undivided attention they could give their patients, according to the health system.
“We’ve placed a lot on our caregivers, and we know that the demands for healthcare with the aging population and fewer and fewer workers in the space are really going to just increase,” Joseph said. “And so these are the types of investments that we can make to make that a little bit better and a little bit more manageable for the long term.”
Corewell will also use Abridge to generate a patient visit summary, written at an eighth-grade reading level to ensure patients could easily understand their care, according to a press release.
The summary could head off questions from patients trying to sift through technical details and medical jargon in their patient portals, Rao said. It would also need to be reviewed by a provider before finalizing.
“Understandably, I might get messages from my patient asking, ‘What was that term? I Googled it. It sounds scary. I don’t remember you ever saying that,’” Rao said. “And so what we’ve recognized for as long as we’ve been around as a company, since 2018, is that we really need to thread the needle and create value for both sets of end users in the room.”
The rollout at Corewell follows multiple new health system partnerships for Abridge this year, including a deployment at Oakland, California-based health system Kaiser Permanente.
But there are plenty of competitors in the AI documentation market, including Microsoft’s Nuance Communications, Suki, Amazon, Veradigm and Oracle.
And as AI becomes an increasingly exciting technology for the healthcare sector, experts say leaders will have to be cautious as they deploy the tools, keeping risks surrounding accuracy and bias at the forefront. Automating administrative and back-office tasks are likely safer places to start before products that involve clinical decision-making, experts said at HLTH in October.
Still, when using AI documentation tools, it’s key to have a provider validate the text before signing off, Joseph said.
“We’re reinforcing that criticality of the human in the loop process for anything that we’re doing with AI in the clinical space,” he said.
