Enhancing healthcare with AI
Most doctors enter the medical profession with a passion for helping patients. Yet, the current healthcare system often forces them to spend countless hours on administrative tasks such as managing electronic health records (EHRs), documentation, coding, billing, and dealing with prior authorizations. In many cases, this workload exceeds the time they can dedicate to actual patient care. Unfortunately, this imbalance contributes to physician burnout, inefficiencies, and a decline in the quality of care provided to patients.
Ambience Healthcare is addressing this issue by introducing an AI-powered platform designed to automate these routine tasks, freeing up clinicians to focus more on their patients.
AI co-pilots for clinicians
“We develop co-pilots to provide clinicians with AI-enhanced capabilities,” says Mike Ng MBA ’16, CEO of Ambience Healthcare, who co-founded the company alongside Nikhil Buduma ’17. “Our platform integrates directly into EHRs, allowing clinicians to concentrate on what truly matters: delivering exceptional patient care.”
Ambience’s platform streamlines tasks such as pre-charting, real-time AI scribing, and selecting the correct insurance billing codes from thousands of rules. It even sends post-visit summaries to patients and their families in multiple languages, ensuring that everyone is well-informed and aligned.
Transforming healthcare systems nationwide
Currently, Ambience is in use across around 40 large healthcare institutions, including UCSF Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, and John Muir Health. The platform supports clinicians in over 100 specialties and subspecialties, including emergency departments, inpatient hospital settings, and oncology wards.
The results speak for themselves. Clinicians using Ambience report saving up to two to three hours per day on documentation, experiencing lower burnout, and forming stronger bonds with their patients.
From a personal challenge to a transformative solution
Mike Ng’s journey to revolutionizing healthcare began in 2012 when he fractured his back and encountered the inefficiencies of the U.S. medical system firsthand. Misdiagnosed and placed on an incorrect care plan, Ng realized how much time clinicians spent on documentation and administrative tasks. In fact, the average doctor only dedicates 27% of their time to direct patient care.
Ng met Buduma at MIT in 2014, and the two quickly formed a partnership. Together, they founded their first healthcare startup, Remedy Health. Their experiences sparked a deeper understanding of how AI could be utilized to address healthcare’s most pressing challenges.
The role of AI in healthcare’s future
As AI technology advanced, Ng and Buduma saw an opportunity to leverage AI models, such as transformers, to improve the efficiency of healthcare operations. By fine-tuning these models for specific medical fields, they developed Ambience’s AI-powered scribe, which records doctor-patient interactions in a HIPAA-compliant manner.
The platform has since evolved to handle intricate tasks such as insurance coding and billing, which involve thousands of changing rules. This ensures that documentation not only supports clinicians but also back-office operations like revenue cycle management.
Empowering patients and clinicians alike
One of Ambience’s most appreciated features is its ability to generate comprehensive visit summaries for patients and their families. “Before Ambience, patients often had to rely on what they could recall from their doctor’s visit,” Buduma explains. “Now, patients leave with a detailed summary of the visit and all the shared decision-making, delivered right to their portal. This creates a better experience for everyone involved.”
Democratizing access to healthcare
By improving clinician productivity, Ambience is helping alleviate the growing shortage of medical professionals, particularly in rural areas of the U.S., where access to specialty care remains a significant challenge. “In rural America, patients have a 40% higher risk of preventable hospitalizations, and much of this is due to limited access to specialists,” says Ng.
Looking ahead, Ambience aims to democratize healthcare by expanding access to expert medical knowledge across the U.S. As AI models become more intelligent and clinically reliable, Ambience hopes to bring the expertise of top academic medical centers to underserved populations.
By streamlining processes and enhancing both clinician and patient experiences, AI platforms like Ambience are shaping the future of healthcare. For more insights into how AI is transforming industries, explore our post on AI’s impact on supply chain management.