Ambience Healthcare has deepened its product integration with its soon-to-be artificial intelligence scribe competitor Epic Systems via a shared customer: Onvida Health in Yuma County, Arizona.
Electronic medical record giant Epic announced that it is developing its own ambient scribe by early next year at the company's annual Users Group Meeting in August.
All of Ambience Healthcare’s AI products for clinical documentation are now embedded into the desktop and mobile versions of Epic’s EHR, Epic Hyperspace and Epic Haiku, the company announced Wednesday.
Now, health system partners like Onvida Health that use Epic for clinical documentation will have an enhanced experience of Ambience's pre-visit chart summarization tool and its post-visit compliance and coding feature. Ambience’s other products, its hallmark ambient scribe and its patient instructions tool, have been integrated into Epic since 2023.
One of the first projects Marc Chasin, M.D., worked on at Onvida Health when he started in the role of senior vice president and chief information officer just over a year ago was to ease clinicians’ documentation burden, he told Fierce Healthcare.
After completing thorough research of several ambient scribe products, Chasin said he chose Ambience because of its understanding of the clinical workflow. Onvida was scheduled to complete a six-month pilot with the vendor, but Chasin ended the pilot after three-and-a-half weeks because of the product's clear benefit to providers, he said.
Onvida undertook its trial period with Ambience before the chart summarization and coding tools were integrated into Epic. By the time Chasin was onboarding providers onto the platform, the Epic integration was complete, he said.
Onvida Health is one of the largest healthcare providers in southwestern Arizona. The system includes two hospitals, 430 inpatient beds and 45 outpatient clinics and employs 495 providers across 52 specialties.
“For a rural health system that we are, the technology is probably better than some of the other places that I have worked,” Chasin said. “Not only that, technology is one thing, but having the leadership around you to drive technological innovations is often more important than technology itself.”
Chasin said adding the chart summarization and coding features to Epic Hyperspace and Haiku will ease the experience Onvida’s providers have using Ambience.
“People will have decades of information in their medical record… it's like for a doctor a needle in a haystack. Where do I look? Where do I start? If I'm admitting a patient during the night and they have congestive heart failure, it'd be nice to know if, in the past year, they had an echocardiogram,” Chasin explained of the chart summarization feature.
Ambience and competitor scribe company Abridge have both said they are not worried about Epic’s venture into ambient scribing technology and will continue their partnerships with the massive EHR company.
“We are phenomenal partners with Epic, and we view this as a symbiotic relationship,” Will Morris, M.D., chief medical officer at Ambience Healthcare, said in an interview. “Our success is their success. Our success is our providers’, our health systems’ success. And ultimately, the most important thing is it's the patient's success, better care, higher quality, lower cost, and that value.”
Chasin explained that the health system is committed to Ambience as its AI scribe partner, and, if it’s seeking new technologies, it will check with its existing partners to see whether something similar is on the road map for the coming 18 months before contracting with another vendor.
“Ambience in the ambient listening area is our partner,” Chasin said when asked whether the health system has deployed any other AI solutions. “We evaluate additional partners all the time, but there are going to be different AI solutions for different areas, right? We're looking at Epic, the Epic AI suite. There may be something in there that is relevant for us, that is not in the wheelhouse of Ambience Healthcare.”
Editor's Note: Onvida's pilot with Ambience was scheduled to last six months.