Ambience Healthcare rolled out Chart Chat for Nursing, touting it as the first electronic health record-integrated artificial intelligence conversational tool for inpatient nurses.
The tool pulls from the EHR to allow nurses to ask questions on patients’ charts, with each response paired with full citations, the company said in a press release. Nurses can ask plain-language questions, pulling from physician progress notes, hospital policy, documentation, orders and recent labs in seconds. Executives said the new feature marks the company’s first step in its purpose-built nursing roadmap with new capabilities planned in the future.
Cleveland Clinic is the first health system to pilot the program, and will aid Ambience in developing its “purpose-built nursing roadmap,” executive said.
To ensure patient safety, Chart Chat responses are controlled by standard deployment evaluations, real-time response quality monitoring and continuous “nurse-in-the-loop” feedback. If the AI tool encounters “ambiguity or insufficient data,” the platform will explicitly tell the nurse.
Ambience Healthcare Head of Product Tanha Kabir told Fierce Healthcare there is no similar AI tool “commercially available to nurses.”
“Most AI tools for nurses today focus on ambient documentation and were originally built for physicians,” Kabir said. “But the nurses on our team and our nursing partners have been very clear: nurses aren’t struggling with a lack of information, they’re drowning in it.”
A January 2022 study published in the National Library of Medicine found nurses in the U.S. can spend between 25% to 41% of their time on documentation.
“We know that nurses can spend a significant portion of their shift in the EHR,” Kabir said. “Reducing that burden has meaningful downstream effects, more time at the bedside, smoother care coordination, and ultimately safer patient care.”
Nurses using the tool say it is “helping them build a richer, more confident understanding” of patients, according to Kabir.
“They have also consistently cited time savings, particularly for complex, long-stay patients where synthesizing the full admission history used to take significant effort,” Kabir said, adding that it has been “especially useful” for handoff prep, care trends and quick answers of specific clinical questions.
“The overall sentiment has been that this is a tool nurses are genuinely excited about and want to use, which is rare in healthcare technology,” Kabir said.
Founded in 2020, Ambience built a platform that uses AI for documentation, clinical documentation integrity and point-of-care coding. The AI documentation software records patient appointments, automates documentation with ambient listening and preps them with specialty-specific chart summaries. In July, the company secured $243 million in series C funding, marking one of the largest health tech raises so last year.
The company continues to build out new AI tools and last fall it launched an ICD-10 clinical document integrity assistant for inpatient care. At the time, executives noted the company saw big opportunities to support allied health and nursing staff with AI assistive agents.
Publisher: Source link
