Ambience Healthcare has partnered with Houston Methodist to enhance emergency and inpatient care through ambient AI technology and optimise documentation and workflows.
Houston Methodist clinicians can use Ambience’s solutions to address the challenges of emergency and inpatient environments, marking a significant advancement in patient care.
Ambience Healthcare’s new offerings focus on the unique demands of emergency and inpatient care settings.
The solutions, developed in collaboration with Houston Methodist clinicians, are designed to navigate the unpredictable nature of these environments.
Initial pilots have demonstrated the technology’s effectiveness in managing documentation requirements, high-acuity patient panels, and nonlinear workflows.
Houston Methodist CMIO and chief health AI officer Jordan Dale said: “As the burden of documentation and coding demands continues to expand across medicine, we are committed to finding new ways to relieve our encumbered clinicians with AI technology that enhances the patient-provider experience.
“We have seen the success of ambient AI in the ambulatory setting and are proud of this collaboration between Ambience and Houston Methodist that not only expands on this success but also offers an EHR-integrated solution for the inpatient setting — a first-of-its-kind endeavour for a health system.”
Houston Methodist Emergency Department medical director Christopher Ziebell said: “We are seeing initial success in replacing many functions formerly done by scribes. The technology is incredibly accurate, and we look forward to testing the full capabilities of the system now that it is fully Epic-integrated.”
The new AI solutions provide speciality-specific, contextualised documentation, allowing emergency department clinicians to capture essential details during hospital stay.
The system records provider-patient conversations and extracts information from relevant charts, such as labs and past notes, to provide necessary context for clinicians.
The AI technology also incorporates coding awareness, understanding the specific coding needs of different care settings to reduce the cognitive load on clinicians.
In addition, streamlined workflows are supported through features like smart dictation and context-aware patient summaries.
Seamless integration with electronic health records (EHR) is another crucial aspect.
By automatically populating patient information into the Ambience system, clinicians can reduce the time spent on manual data entry.
The integration not only decreases click mileage but also enhances coding accuracy and workflow efficiency, allowing clinicians to focus more on patient care.
Ambience Healthcare CEO Michael Ng said: “Health care providers in emergency and inpatient settings face extraordinary documentation burdens that take time away from complex patient care.
“We realise that to truly have impacted a health system, we had to go beyond the ambulatory setting.
“Without addressing acute care settings, we would not have comprehensively addressed the needs of our health system partners, ensuring clinicians in those environments could focus more fully on patients while enabling hospitals to capture the full value of care delivered.”
