As artificial intelligence tools make their way into hospitals and doctor's offices, Elation Health saw a big opportunity to leverage its expertise in building clinical-first tech to roll out AI purpose-built for primary care doctors.
Elation Health, founded in 2010, developed electronic medical record technology for primary care clinicians and has since expanded its capabilities to serve as an "all-in-one" technology solution with a unified EHR and billing software system.
Now, the company is offering a new ambient note generation product, called Note Assist, that is embedded in its EHR platform, designed for the complex patient visit requirements of primary care, according to executives.
"We're bringing to market an opportunity to really make physicians lives easier, reduce documentation burden, and do so in a way that's incredibly well integrated into existing workflows," Kyna Fong, CEO of Elation Health, said in an interview.
AI scribing technology has become a top tech priority among providers and the market is growing increasingly competitive with AI-based solutions. But, most of the AI scribing technologies available are bolt-on solutions that have to be integrated into EHRs versus natively built in.
Elation Health executives also contend that many EHRs were originally built as billing systems and not specifically for patient encounters so the AI technology being built on top still requires many steps or changing systems.
Elation Health's Note Assist goes beyond simple transcription and extracts relevant information from the physician-patient visit and inserts it directly into a structured note, which saves clinicians' time. The company's approach also fits within the clinician's workflow as its AI medical scribe was built inside the EHR versus a third-party layer that sits on top, Fong said.
This solution also works with the physician’s own note templates, taking into account both existing note context and patient details to craft precise documentation in near real-time.
"The native templates that are in the EHR are usually a heavily relied-upon tool by physicians, not only to kind of shortcut the documentation they have to do, but they actually use it as an outline of the agenda that they're setting with their patient to make sure they remember to cover the important parts of a visit for patients with particular conditions," Fong noted.
Details from the patient visit conversation continuously populate the template and other discrete sections of the note, reducing the work of clinical documentation while also helping clinicians to quickly get a sense of visit completeness and confirm any final details with the patient, executives said.
The Note Assist technology will develop comprehensive notes using existing note content and patient chart context to intelligently populate clinical details into structured fields. "It can identify within a visit that a prescription has been ordered or a referral to a particular specialist or a lab, and since it has access to all of the native EHR context and capabilities, it can tee those things. This improves on the whole notion of reducing documentation burden, increasing the amount of time the physician can focus on the patient and reducing the distraction that comes from interacting with any sort of technology system," Fong noted.
Elation Health's AI tool enables the clinical note to be updated periodically throughout the visit to minimize delays at the end, Fong noted. "That allows for more more continuity and a more natural flow of reviewing the note," she said.
Clinicians experience minimal workflow changes while having continuous access to patient data and EHR tools to make the most of their time with patients.
Early adopters testing the feature already report significant benefits with using the Note Assist solution for medical notetaking. According to a survey, clinicians reported saving 13 minutes per visit on average using Note Assist. The survey also found that 75% reported experiencing more joy in their work and 87% said that they provided better patient care and experienced less burnout when using the solution.
One primary care physician in Texas said, "Note Assist has reduced my documentation time by approximately 40%. Completing notes requires minimal effort now."
"Elation Note Assist has transformed my practice. It accurately and concisely summarizes patient conversations, allowing me to relax and maintain face-to-face interaction during visits. This technology is a game-changer - I use it with every visit.” said Michelle M. Davis, M.D. in Louisiana. “Now my patients see me not just the back of a laptop."
To build the ambient AI scribe, Elation Health did extensive research within its provider community to leanr about the challenges with EHR documentation.
Fong founded the San Francisco-based company with her brother after the siblings helped their father, a primary care physician, bring his practice to the U.S. from Canada. The company designed its EHR solution to meet the needs of independent primary care providers with intuitive charting, seamless integrations and developer capabilities.
Elation now serves 32,000 clinicians caring for more than 16 million Americans. The company's EHR is used across traditional and progressive care settings including independent practices, on-site employer clinics, at-home models and hybrid teams.
The company's approach to AI innovation follows its clinician-first approach with developing its EHR, Fong noted.
"We started from the first principles of where are physicians experiencing the most burden and the most pain? You look at studies of how much time physicians are spending in EHRs, burnout that comes along with it an this notion of 'pajama time' spent after hours doing documentation work. We identified that the documentation of an encounter is a huge amount of time spent, and also an opportunity where AI can make a big improvement," Fong said.
“The connection between patient and physician is invaluable and easy to disrupt,” said Phill Tornroth, vice president of engineering at Elation Health in a statement. “It was critical for this first intelligent feature to not only prove useful in the EHR, but also to show what is possible when AI is designed for trust by primary care experts with a deep understanding of clinician workflows.”
Fong said Elation’s new Note Assist solution is just the start of the company's "larger vision for transforming the EHR from a supportive technology to a valued assistant to the clinician. "For a decade, Elation has earned the highest physician satisfaction ratings with our technology innovation. Our approach to AI raises the bar again. Primary care physicians deserve tools that respect their craft," she said.
The company has several other AI features in development, executives said. According to Fong, there are numerous EHR workflows that present opportunities to add in the "magic" of AI to make clinicians' lives easier.
"There are equally powerful, small, micro opportunities to leverage AI and LLMs (large language models) throughout the EHR workflow," she added.
Elation Health's vision is to enable "touchless" patient encounters, Fong noted. "We said, 'If we want to invest in this, how do we aspire towards an encounter where the physician just sees the patient and everything is generated for them.' They don't have to interact with the technology. It became pretty clear to us that both having something that was in the EHR, built as a first-class citizen, not just a third-party add-on, but something that would have full access to all the patient chart context, all of the actions that can be taken, and all of the physicians' preferences and experiences, that that would be instrumental in really achieving the vision of touchless encounters," she said.