Ambience Healthcare uses AI to help doctors spend less time on paperwork – and more time saving lives.
Losing loved ones to cancer drove best friends Mike Ng, 41, and Nikhil Buduma, 30, to harness the power of AI to save lives. They met in 2013 as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ng lost his uncle to lung cancer and was pursuing an MBA to make his career in health care; Buduma lost a mentor who “was like a second mother” to him to cancer the year before he began his master’s program in computer science.
Buduma’s mentor, Sally Veregge, learned she had sarcoma of the elbow in 2012, but errors handling her medical records may have contributed to her death. The same year Veregge passed away, Ng broke his back in a gym accident. While recovering, he started spending more time with the doctor he was dating, and was shocked by how often she brought patient charts home to fill out. He thought there was a technology-based solution to her documentation overload.
After graduation, Ng and Buduma learned everything they could about emerging AI technology, eventually founding two companies using the AI they built together: Remedy Health, a health care technology company that used AI for patient intake (it was later acquired), and their pandemic quarantine project, Ambience Healthcare, an AI platform for medical documentation, coding, and workflows.
With Ambience, physicians don’t fill out paperwork for patient visits. Using HIPAA-compliant AI, the platform records conversations between doctors and patients, transcribes them, and converts the notes into codes used to bill insurance companies. Ambience’s AI constantly updates code changes, ensuring that claims and, most important, treatment are approved in a timely manner.
Ambience is now used by major health systems across the U.S., including Ardent Health, Cleveland Clinic, and St. Luke’s Health System. In July, the company secured $243 million in Series C funding from Oak HC/FT, Andreessen Horowitz, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and other investors to scale it further; it is currently valued at $1.25 billion.
“We would not wish what we went through on any other person, but I think it gives us a sense of purpose,” says Buduma. “It’s why we wake up every single day.”
