Regard has upgraded its AI platform to enable doctors to more accurately diagnose patients at the bedside.
The company developed a proprietary diagnostic engine to identify missed conditions like hypertension, malnutrition and sepsis by combining all data in the patient chart with data from patient conversations. This helps to surface diagnostic insights and critical clinical context, executives said.
The new capability, called proactive documentation, meshes together two sources—data and voice—to generate a draft note before a patient encounter and then can pull in ambient dictation during the patient visit, according to the company.
"This is the first product to market that can intelligently combine the key information from the conversation that a doctor has with the data that's in the medical record to make a complete note," Eli Ben-Joseph, founder and CEO of Regard, said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare.
"The beauty of combining these two things is that you're going to get the most up-to-date information from that conversation that you just had, and you're going to be able to marry it with the historical data," he added. "When Regard generates the draft of the note for the doctor, it's not only going to have information like, 'The patient is here because they have chest pain. They have swelling in certain places. They're on these medications.' It will also be able to say, 'In the data, we're seeing a history of heart failure, we're seeing a history of taking this kind of medication, a history of smoking. We're also seeing new data that's saying they might have a different condition that you're not aware of.' Combining those two things, it gives doctors way more information than before."
Several health systems have been early testers for the new "proactive documentation" capability and Regard plans to make it available to all 150 hospitals it works with by the end of the year, said Nate Wilson, founder and president of Regard.
David Kirk, M.D., chief clinical integration officer at WakeMed Health and Hospitals, said Regard has been a game-changer, as it surfaces critical information that may have been missed, directly impacting patient care without adding extra work for doctors or more time spent in the EHR. In the hospital setting, very sick or complex patients are often seen by different care teams and details can be lost.
"This new capability is going to radically change the way that we practice medicine, especially in the ICU," said Kirk, who is a medical intensivist in the ICU unit. He has seen firsthand on the frontlines of care how Regard's augmented intelligence has surfaced critical information at the point of care.
"You can use natural language just to query the chart, which, to me, is one of the most amazing things that I've ever seen," Kirk said. "One of my ICU colleagues said, 'I use this on every patient, because Regard has caught things,' and I feel like for him, it's an ethical component. Regard is that double-check behind him to make sure that nothing gets missed."
WakeMed began piloting the new capability with hospitalists at one hospital and has now rolled out to all three hospitals with plans to make it available to all clinicians over the next year, Kirk said.
Regard, a Fierce Healthcare Fierce 15 honoree, was founded in 2017 and provides AI-powered proactive diagnosing. Ben-Joseph and Wilson were premed students who took the MCATs exam but were warned off the field by unhappy doctors feeling the weight of burnout.
They circled back around on the issue later in their careers and noticed two key trends: more and more patient data being stored in digital medical records, and clinicians growing frustrated at their inability to parse the glut of patient data.
Regard’s EHR-integrated technology mines those digitized patient data, distills them and generates clinical insights that are delivered to the doctors as a clinical note.
Despite the staggering amount of data generated by the healthcare sector, 97% of it goes unused, according to a study from the World Economic Forum. Doctors typically only have time to review a small percentage of the data that is in a patient's medical record.
Regard rolled out its AI-powered platform in 2020 to tackle these data "blind spots" and surface clinical insights and provide clinicians with the most important information about a patient. The company has surpassed 8 million diagnosis recommendations that have been accepted by physicians.
Regard has expanded its capabilities to generate insights from both chart data and conversations between patients and physicians in the room, creating near-complete drafts of notes in the physician’s preferred writing style, according to the company.
There are many companies in the AI medical scribe space that capture clinical conversations, but these tools don't have access to all the data, Ben-Joseph said.
"I think the heart and soul of Regard is our ability to recommend diagnosis, and almost no company is doing that because it's incredibly hard, but also because it requires making sense of a huge amount of data. We've been doing that for four or five years in production with all these hospitals," Wilson said.
He used an analogy that Regard built the tools that help fly a plane while AI medical scribes built tools to help record the conversation.
"It's really easy for us to jump to that lane versus them to jump into our lane. While a lot of scribes are now starting to talk about data, they're really using LLMs [large language models] to summarize data, not making a really nuanced view of the clinical work," Wilson said. "That's what is different about Regard; it recommends diagnoses, and the voice just brings that last missing element to that scope of data."
The updated Regard platform includes note writing in the physician’s own style to create first drafts that reflect each clinician’s preferred writing style along with integrated ambient scribe functionality, allowing health systems to use Regard’s scribe or integrate with an existing ambient scribe.
The platform also provides support for all specialties, via system-wide diagnostic coverage
Regard also announced new agentic workflows through its AI agent, called Max, that can answer questions based on patient data, summarizing encounters and supporting clinical workflows.
How Regard supports patient care, quality measures and financial outcomes
At WakeMed, like many health systems, clinical leaders are focused on ensuring accurate and complete documentation to support clinical quality and coding for reimbursement.
"We realized our care was amazing, but the documentation around that care was not amazing. So one of the strategic initiatives I led was to make our quality scores better," Kirk said. "But what you cannot do is make the doctor spend more time in the chart, which is a really difficult problem to try to solve because if you document more, it's going to cause more work."
As part of these efforts, Kirk's team reviewed more than a dozen AI software vendors, including AI scribe technologies. WakeMed chose Regard as the technology surfaces critical insights at the point of care while also saving clinicians' time, producing more accurate documentation to support quality measures, he said. Accurate coding is especially critical for inpatient and ICU care as patients are often very sick and complex.
"[Regard] saves the doctors time and it gives them augmented intelligence to focus on the important parts of the chart that they need," Kirk said. "When I put on my administrative hat, by the documentation being more accurate, you're going to get all the quality points that you want, which is fantastic. Margins right now are terrible across all hospital systems. When you code more accurately and it reflects how sick and complex these patients are, then you also pull in more revenue as well."
He added, "The patient gets better care. The doctors are happy. Hospitals are happy because the quality scores are better, and the CEO and the board, and everybody's happy because more revenue is coming in. You're getting paid for the degree of illness of the patient that you have. It's getting the chart correct, getting that kind of canvas that the doctors write on correct is so important for quality, for revenue and for patient care."