Elation Health, the electronic health record built for primary care, is turning to AI with a heady pitch for clinicians: it works better than other solutions at no additional cost.
Elation Health built its EHR to improve the primary care experience with a focus on the clinical use of the EHR, not strictly on the use of the technology as a billing tool.
Kyna Fong, CEO and co-founder of Elation Health, said the new push to bring clinical-first AI onto the platform feels like going back to the founding mission of the company – to focus on driving better clinical care, not the bottom line.
“We were pretty disappointed that everything was built around billing or administrative needs and not the clinical and so we built something and put it in its practice under a clinical-first philosophy, like putting patient care first and foremost, and really thinking about how we enable and enhance the patient-physician relationship,” Fong said of the founding of the company and the founders’ experience of other EHR products.
This week, Elation Health announced the launch of several AI features, which are natively built into the EHR. The products can identify and proactively reach out to patients due for specific services, analyze population health data and explore it using natural language, and deliver clinical suggestions to doctors from the patient’s chart.
The suite of tools is completely free for users of Elation’s EHR, as are its existing AI scribe called “Note Assist” and task automation feature “Actions.”
“These aren't bolt-ons or add-ons or third parties stuck on top,” Fong said in an interview. “This is really kind of rethinking, what are the core workflows? What are the core problems that we're trying to solve for our customers? What are the needs that they have? And then using AI as a tool in our toolkit to solve them faster, more comprehensively, more delightfully.”
Native-built AI will work more seamlessly for clinicians than AI products that are “integrated” into electronic health records software owned by other companies, Fong said.
“You don't have to check to see which information can flow back and forth and build explicit integration and get stymied by the fact that some data is structured in different ways,” Fong said. “A natively built solution is going to lead to more streamlined and intuitive workflows for the users.”
Elation can build more comprehensive features because of its full access to the chart. Its ambient scribe and a task automation feature are bolstered by the context the AI undergirded system has through its full access to the patient chart. That makes it easy for AI-generated notes to reference past patient issues and medical history.
“All of those things are sort of advanced capabilities that are very natural when the AI capabilities are built first, built natively into the platform,” Fong explained.
While embedding AI in the product, Fong said the company also took the time to teach staff about the differences between LLMs and traditional software and to encourage the use of AI tools internally so everyone could understand its benefits.
Another key differentiator of Elation’s AI is that it comes at no additional cost to Elation users. Popular AI scribes, for example, charge monthly access fees for each clinician using the technology. Hospital IT departments are also planning to increase their budgets to accommodate the procurement of expensive, but necessary, AI tools.
“This is not an expensive add on,” Fong said. “This is how we think that EHRs and that experience should be going forward because of the value that it can deliver, the promise that it has for clinicians.”
Fong continued: “Part of our vision is to democratize these tools for not just the large healthcare systems [that] have deep pockets, but also for the long tail of small practices who truly have a lot to benefit from and serve important populations and can really gain a lot from these technologies.”
Elation Health was also one of 60 companies to sign the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) interoperability pledge on July 30. Fong, who attended the White House event featuring HHS leaders and President Donald Trump, said Elation is excited to collaborate with the coalition of companies to tackle outstanding issues with health data interoperability.
Elation has built its product with open data-sharing policies and open access APIs. It has long worked with partners it shares clients with, like wearable companies, to integrate their technologies, Fong said.