Ambient artificial intelligence platform Ambience Healthcare continues to grow its reach with more health systems now signing on Ardent Health as its latest enterprise customer.
Ardent, based in Nashville, Tennessee, operates 30 hospitals and approximately 280 sites of care across six states.
The health system was looking at technology solutions to address provider burnout, tackle administrative tasks and reduce cognitive load, Anika Gardenhire, chief digital and transformation officer at Ardent, told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview about the partnership.
“We continue to look at how we surround our clinicians with technologies that really will support retention, support the best patient care and support people practicing at the top of license. Our impact and transformation committee began to look at what are the solutions that are out there in the marketplace that might help us to do that work. As you can imagine, lots of folks come to bear as a part of that process. There’s a pretty rigorous set of questions and interactions that our team goes through to determine who we might want to do a pilot with. Through our innovation process, Ambience emerged as a top partner for us,” Gardenhire said in an interview.
Ambience’s platform uses AI for documentation, clinical workflow, documentation integrity and point-of-care coding. Ardent initially piloted Ambience’s technology among ambulatory providers across 17 specialties and seven languages.
The health system saw strong results from that pilot program—70% of Ardent’s pilot clinicians reported reduced cognitive load, which improved their focus on patient care, and 100% of pilot clinicians stated that Ambience improved their job satisfaction.
Clinician productivity and efficiency also improved, with a 45% decrease in documentation time, based on Epic UAL data, and five hours per week saved in documentation time per clinician.
“We looked at provider productivity, and by that we mean the natural ability to see more patients, but more so than anything, we’re looking at provider productivity as it related to patient contact time. If you think about the holistic aspect of a visit, how much time was the provider spending with the patient versus on other things?” Gardenhire said. “The other thing that we were looking at is clinical accuracy of the documentation. How well were we doing at appropriately capturing the documentation? And then, of course, we were looking at provider satisfaction, so really taking a very close look at ease of use for the tool, ease of training to the tool, and the integration and ease into the workflow with the EHR [electronic health record].”
The health system also reported a 90% encounter utilization rate among its pilot providers with more than 140,000 patient encounters documented using Ambience to date.
“The overwhelming feedback that we got was ‘Don’t take this away,’ and then the other overwhelming feedback we got among people who were not in the pilot saying, ‘When am I going to get my turn?'” Gardenhire said.
