Editor's Note: This story was updated to clarify that the partnership is with the Permanente Medical Group, not Kaiser Permanente.
Nabla, maker of an autonomous clinical AI scribe, has joined forces with the Permanente Medical Group (TPMG) to roll out its tool to 10,000 doctors in Northern California.
The Nabla Copilot will be available to doctors across all care settings and specialties by the end of the ongoing, multiweek rollout. The deployment comes after a successful pilot, according to the partners, and aims to reduce administrative burden to allow doctors to focus on patient care. Permanente Medical Group, which provides care to Kaiser Permanente members and patients, is the largest physician-led medical group in the nation.
The generative AI tool autonomously captures any physician-patient encounter, in-person or virtual, across any medical specialty. It features multiple readily available clinical templates, making it a versatile offering for large health system customers. The tool is intuitive enough that it doesn't require any training to self-onboard, per the startup, and has 95% accuracy.
“Nabla Copilot’s traction among physicians is a direct result of more than four years of diligent product development by our team of former Meta AI Research engineers who collaborated closely with doctors to anticipate the way AI could transform healthcare delivery,“ Alex Lebrun, co-founder and CEO of Nabla, said in a press release. “We are proud to partner with Kaiser to improve the lives of thousands of their health practitioners and to help bring the organization to the forefront of AI-powered care delivery transformation.”
Available via mobile, desktop and API, Nabla Copilot launches with just one click. The tool uses a combination of proprietary models and industry large language models to transcribe an entire provider-patient conversation in English or Spanish. It then generates a structured, EHR-integrated clinical note in less than 20 seconds, which the company said makes Nabla Copilot the fastest medical scribe on the market.
Doctors using Nabla Copilot report saving 1.5 hours a day with the tool, the company said. Less than 5% of the generated notes are modified by doctors.
Nabla is free to all doctors for up to 30 consultations per month. After that, it costs $120 per month per provider. For enterprise clients, Nabla offers bulk pricing.
The startup is working to integrate with major EHRs, though specific partnerships have not yet been announced. Rather, the company is selling Nabla Copilot to EHR vendors’ customers, executives said.
Nabla said it wanted all doctors to be able to try the product regardless of their EHR, and so designed the tool to work even without integration via a browser extension. The feature is especially helpful for video visits happening on Zoom or a similar platform. For in-person consultations, Nabla works better on a phone that can integrate with the EHR, executives said.
The company wants to avoid making clinical recommendations. “We’re just here to listen and stick to what the doctor said,” Lebrun told Fierce Healthcare. The tool generates a note for the doctor as well as instructions for patients, which further help providers save time, he added.
Nabla was founded out of Paris, a city that like all others in the EU must comply with the GDPR privacy rule, the most strict in the world. Thus, Nabla does not store any user data. Nabla spent three years building out its own large language models. “We spent a lot of time before to collect our own data. We don’t need to collect our customers’ data,” Lebrun said.
However, notes from the past 20 consultations are stored locally on a user’s device in case they need to be accessed.
“It’s a very crowded market,” Lebrun acknowledged. Competitors tend to focus on revenue cycle management as the primary benefit of a medical scribe, he said. While Nabla can also generate codes to ensure providers bill accurately, the startup prefers to emphasize Nabla Copilot as a quality of life tool.
“We focus a lot on bringing back joy to our users,” Lebrun said. “So when they talk about the value, our users tend to say 'OK, I really enjoyed caregiving again, I'm stress free, I can listen to the patient.'”