Ambient artificial intelligence platform Ambience Healthcare continues to grow its reach with more health systems now signing on Ardent Health as its latest enterprise customer.
Ardent, based in Nashville, Tennessee, operates 30 hospitals and approximately 280 sites of care across six states.
The health system was looking at technology solutions to address provider burnout, tackle administrative tasks and reduce cognitive load, Anika Gardenhire, chief digital and transformation officer at Ardent, told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview about the partnership.
"We continue to look at how we surround our clinicians with technologies that really will support retention, support the best patient care and support people practicing at the top of license. Our impact and transformation committee began to look at what are the solutions that are out there in the marketplace that might help us to do that work. As you can imagine, lots of folks come to bear as a part of that process. There's a pretty rigorous set of questions and interactions that our team goes through to determine who we might want to do a pilot with. Through our innovation process, Ambience emerged as a top partner for us," Gardenhire said in an interview.
Ambience’s platform uses AI for documentation, clinical workflow, documentation integrity and point-of-care coding. Ardent initially piloted Ambience's technology among ambulatory providers across 17 specialties and seven languages.
The health system saw strong results from that pilot program—70% of Ardent’s pilot clinicians reported reduced cognitive load, which improved their focus on patient care, and 100% of pilot clinicians stated that Ambience improved their job satisfaction.
Clinician productivity and efficiency also improved, with a 45% decrease in documentation time, based on Epic UAL data, and five hours per week saved in documentation time per clinician.
"We looked at provider productivity, and by that we mean the natural ability to see more patients, but more so than anything, we're looking at provider productivity as it related to patient contact time. If you think about the holistic aspect of a visit, how much time was the provider spending with the patient versus on other things?" Gardenhire said. "The other thing that we were looking at is clinical accuracy of the documentation. How well were we doing at appropriately capturing the documentation? And then, of course, we were looking at provider satisfaction, so really taking a very close look at ease of use for the tool, ease of training to the tool, and the integration and ease into the workflow with the EHR [electronic health record]."
The health system also reported a 90% encounter utilization rate among its pilot providers with more than 140,000 patient encounters documented using Ambience to date.
"The overwhelming feedback that we got was 'Don't take this away,' and then the other overwhelming feedback we got among people who were not in the pilot saying, 'When am I going to get my turn?'" Gardenhire said.
"I've been doing systems implementations for quite a while. I'm a registered nurse by clinical background. This is definitely one of the first technologies that I can say, throughout my career, where you don't actually have to implement it. It's one of the few things that you could allow to go viral, and it has that extreme uptick, super positive effect that clinicians really want to use it and have it at their disposal," she added.
Following the successful pilot, Ardent plans to launch an enterprisewide deployment of Ambience's AI platform across its ambulatory network. The health system aims to have the tech deployed with its medical groups by the end of the first quarter next year.
The long-term plan is to expand Ambience's technology across the Ardent network, supporting nurses, emergency departments and inpatient units, Gardenhire said.
"There's no adoption curve like this. I have a running joke as a long-term implementer that it took us 100 years to adopt a stethoscope, and we knew it worked. It's one of those things where just the normal sort of adoption curve is really unparalleled when it comes to the use of this type of solution," Gardenhire said.
At Ardent, pilot providers use the ambient tech for 90% of scheduled visits in the Epic EHR, Nikhil Buduma, co-founder and chief scientist at Ambience Healthcare, noted.
"If you talk to most institutions about their ambient implementations, they'll tell you about half of the clinicians who try it actually continue to use it long-term. One hundred percent of the clinicians in the pilot [at Ardent] continue to use it long-term, and all of them said that Ambience improves their job satisfaction, which was pretty incredible," Buduma said.
At many health systems, about half of providers who test out other ambient technology platforms continue to use it, and even less use the tech for scheduled office visits, Buduma asserted.
"I think it's a testament to our partnership. Anika and her team have just been super rigorous about thinking about, how do we map out the workflows by specialty and get this technology to be implemented in a way where it's useful? And it turns out that if you can get those pieces working with the technology, the people, the processes, the ceiling of how effective this can be is so much higher than what I think the industry averages look like today," he said.
More than 40 U.S. health systems—including Cleveland Clinic, UCSF Health, Houston Methodist and Memorial Hermann—have deployed Ambience's ambient AI technology, according to the company. In July, the company banked $243 million in series C funding, marking one of the largest health tech raises so far in 2025. The funding boosted Ambience's valuation to $1.25 billion.
Ambience says it goes beyond transcription to generate accurate, compliant and specialty-aware clinical notes and codes in real time.
The AI documentation software records patient appointments, automates documentation with ambient listening and preps them with specialty-specific chart summaries. The tech generates comprehensive medical notes and also has built-in features like an ICD-10 assistant and real-time compliance engine, according to the company.
The company claims it can cut charting time by 45%.
Theresa Horton, M.D., a pediatrician at Ardent’s Utica Park Clinic in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called the technology "life changing." “I see myself enjoying my practice longer and am no longer considering early retirement," Horton said.
The excitement about ambient AI scribe technology in healthcare has reached a fever pitch as health systems and medical practices look to adopt the tech to reduce how much time clinicians spend working in the EHR.
But successful deployment of these platforms varies by organization. Technology that fits well into providers' workflow is critical, Gardenhire noted.
"While these are new solutions, I think the recipe for success for adoption is actually a pretty old recipe for success, which is, you have to train really well, you have to have at-the-elbow support and the solution itself needs to be usable and really fit well into the workflow. It's just good old-fashioned, deep understanding of the workflow, and then having people at the elbow who can really support people in the adoption," she said.
She added, "Even when you are solving a really tough challenge, the barriers to success are still there. You do actually still have to solve the workflow challenges. You still have to solve the integration challenges. It still needs to be highly usable. It still needs to be something that you train well on, and then you still have to be able to support people when ultimately, as technology does, there's a hiccup somewhere in the process."
Peer-to-peer education is key as the technology is being rolled out, she noted.
"Having provider groups talking to providers. We are so fortunate to have a really great chief medical information officer. I think the at-the-elbow support is very important, so ensuring that the people who are naturally matriculating through a provider's day, our clinical informatics team, our Epic analysts, have the full picture of this solution and how it's meant to fit in a provider's workflow, so that if there are questions on the fly," she said. "I would also give a huge shoutout to the Ambience training team, being a resource to the providers directly, being a resource to our teams that are trying to work with the providers, is really important."
Ambience’s AI platform also has downstream benefits by enhancing clinical documentation integrity and compliance.
"We want to be able to support providers in the best possible clinical coding and documentation that we can. Being able to use a very similar interaction model to understand whether or not we best captured that interaction, I think, is also very helpful to cognitive load," Gardenhire said.
"How you think about having a conversation with a diabetic patient and the fact that a provider, as their normal course of action, is having a conversation about that patient's eyes or possible retinopathy, and the fact that there are a huge number, 25-plus, different codes specifically around diabetes and whether or not we're able to appropriately capture those HCCs (hierarchical condition category) and get to the most appropriate clinical documentation? Having that listening solution not only help with capturing the documentation, but also reminding the physician that you actually had this diabetic retinopathy conversation as a part of the due course of the visit as well, and let's make sure that we're also capturing that, that's also very important," she noted.
Ardent also observed a measurable patient experience impact. Clinicians who used Ambience during the pilot achieved significant gains in all eight Press Ganey survey patient-satisfaction categories.
"Ambience enables providers to do what they do best, look patients in the eye, listen closely, and focus fully, providing the highest quality care," said Brad Hoyt, M.D., chief medical information officer at Ardent.
Buduma noted the two organizations are in the "early innings" of using the capabilities of the Ambience platform to tackle more complex workflows such as inpatient nursing.
"What we're really excited about is the opportunity to partner with someone like Anika, who's a pioneer, not only as a chief digital officer, but also as a nursing executive who has thought deeply about what the future of the nursing workflow should look like, on building something that isn't just going to be a band-aid on the current system, but rather a sustainable opportunity to use technology to make the profession of nursing a more fulfilling one," he said.
Partnerships between health systems and healthcare AI companies will enable organizations to "imagine the future together in tight alignment with operational and clinical leaders and technology partners," Gardenhire said.
"I think that's where the magic is going to happen. I hope that as good stewards of our patient data, as good clinical caregivers, we will continue to be really good partners so that we can provide the absolute best to our patients. I think that's really the goal from Ardent's perspective around forming these types of partnerships," she said.