As providers rapidly adopt artificial intelligence technology for clinical documentation, there is a demand for AI clinical assistants that meet the needs of specialty medicine practices.
Health tech company Nextech recently launched its next-generation AI assistant, called Cora, along with its clinical documentation feature, Cora Scribe, to provide AI technology that was designed with specialty workflows in mind, according to the company.
Nextech provides electronic medical record and practice management software to specialty physician practices as well as revenue cycle management (RCM), customer relationship management (CRM) and other software systems. The company supports 16,000 physicians, more than 5,500 practices and 60,000 office staff members in the clinical specialties of dermatology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, plastic surgery and medical spa practices.
Asset management firm TPG bought Nextech from Thomas H. Lee Partners for $1.4 billion in July 2023. Rusty Frantz, who led NextGen Healthcare for six years, jumped on board at Nextech as CEO about 18 months ago.
The company's Cora Scribe listens to natural conversations, understands the context and automatically turns the conversations into accurate clinical notes. Cora Scribe marks a move away from generic AI scribing toward specialty-specific clinical assistants, starting with ophthalmology and extending to other specialties over time, Frantz said. "Being truly helpful in the exam room demands more than simple note-taking — it requires alignment with clinical workflows, and that’s what sets Cora apart," he noted.
Complex specialties aren’t served well by bolt-on technology and lightweight generic solutions, he noted.
"Ophthalmology is highly complex and it's challenging because there's so much demand and there's a limited number of clinical workers. The technicians are incredibly important. This is a specialty where simply providing a progress note or a SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) note is not enough. You've really got to support the patient volume. You've got to support the clinical history," Frantz told Fierce Healthcare. "It's a highly parameterized specialty. The charts are very little progress note and very much clinical values."
Cora Scribe is embedded in the Nextech EHR and maintains a continuous two-way conversation with the patient chart. It captures patient encounters in near real time and streams discrete clinical findings directly into the correct fields in the EHR, helping providers chart more efficiently while staying fully present with their patients, according to the company.
"It is truly having an agentic assistant in the room that is not just scribing the physician-patient interaction, but the technician-patient interaction, the physician-patient interaction, the intake interaction. It's the entire patient visit," Frantz said. "It's not just dictation. It's making it truly a data-driven, parameterized charting exercise."
Nextech initially partnered with an AI scribe company to provide AI capabilities to specialty providers, but then pivoted and built the solution in-house, he noted.
"We tried a more lightweight solution. We found it created no value for the specialty practice. We brought it in-house, and we've truly embedded the AI capability into the EHR. We took a harder path, but we're very gratified because we feel like it's the right path for our providers," Frantz said.
The scribe technology has been rolled out to early adopter organizations and Nextech will release it more broadly in April.
Cora Scribe's capabilities enable the solution to listen during the visit and build the clinical note in near real time without interrupting the conversation. Providers don’t have to pause, dictate, or finish notes later. It automatically reviews and updates patient records, avoiding duplicate or conflicting information for new and existing patients. Providers and staff spend less time correcting notes after the visit, according to the company. Cora Scribe also matches findings to provider- and practice-specific configurations and defaults within the Nextech EHR in support of efficiencies practice have already built. And it uses secure, temporary audio and patient consent controls to protect sensitive information without adding extra steps to the visit.
Practices that were early adopters of the scribe technology are reporting significant benefits with better documentation and an improved patient experience.
“Cora helps me move more efficiently with patients and spend more one-on-one time with them,” Ross Sherman, Ophthalmic Technician at Sight360 in Florida, said. “Over the course of a clinic day, it often saves me around 30 minutes and helps me finish with fewer notes left to complete, so I’m not staying late to catch up.”
Neel Vaidya, M.D., chief information officer and medical director of Office-Based Surgery at Chicago Cornea Consultants, participated in the Cora Scribe pilot program.
“When we previewed Cora Scribe earlier this year, it was clear the technology was being built thoughtfully and with real clinical input,” Vaidya, a cataract, cornea, and refractive surgeon, said. “Having had the opportunity to pilot this project from the beginning, it is clear that Nextech has prioritized the user experience and has created a revolutionary product that is going to fundamentally change how we interact with the EMR for the better. Now that it’s officially launching, we’re confident it will make a meaningful difference in how our providers document and allow users to turn their focus back to where it belongs, with the patients."
Nextech is looking to add AI capabilities to tackle additional administrative tasks, such as orders, medications, follow-up appointments and chart summaries, Frantz said. "We're looking at how do we put the right information in front of human capital at the right time to enable them to do their job more effectively at scale," he said.
The company plans to be "aggressive" with innovation going forward, he noted.
"It's about building a healthcare-focused innovation engine that is truly improving the lives of our clients. We're going to focus on our clients' ability to financially thrive, which is what enables them to treat patients," he said.