Ambience, an artificial intelligence platform for documentation, coding and clinical workflow, has been added to Epic’s Toolbox program for ambient voice recognition tools, which expands its footprint and makes it more accessible to clinicians.
The Toolbox program, which is part of Epic Showroom, highlights software categories with recommended practices for integration and the third-party apps that follow those recommendations. AI ambient scribe Suki and Commure also are included in the ambient voice recognition category.
Ambience’s inclusion in the Toolbox program will expand the availability of the company’s AI-powered documentation capabilities to a broader range of Epic customers and launch Ambience’s latest integration with Epic’s Ambient Module and Haiku, according to the company.
With the Toolbox designation, Ambience’s unique, frontier capabilities are available natively inside Haiku, EpicCare’s mobile app. Clinicians can launch from Haiku in outpatient, emergency department and inpatient settings
“Epic has been deepening its integration and partnership with the ambient technology players out in the market,” said Nikhil Buduma, co-founder and chief scientist at Ambience Healthcare. Ambience’s ongoing partnership with Epic enables its technology to be integrated deeply within clinicians’ workflows, he said.
“One of the things that we’ve been able to do with this partnership is take a lot of the features that Ambience customers really love about Ambience that includes things such as in the ED environment, the ability to stop and start recording and have immediate documentation right back into Epic, which previously wasn’t possible with the API specs that Epic had on the market. Now all that functionality is now natively available inside of Epic in Haiku and Hyperspace and Hyperdrive,” Buduma said.
“Clinicians now have those workflows available in the Haiku experience, which is a more ideal end-to-end workflow, so you never have to leave the Epic ecosystem,” he added.
Ambience’s platform uses AI for documentation, clinical documentation integrity and point-of-care coding. The company says it goes beyond transcription to generate accurate, compliant and specialty-aware clinical notes and codes in real time. The company asserts it can surface accurate and precise ICD-10 coding suggestions and generate “coding-aware” documentation that supports selected codes.
Ambience’s latest news caps a busy week in the healthcare AI space as both Oracle and athenahealth unveiled new AI features and upgrades to their EHRs. AI medical scribe player Abridge, in turn, plans to work with Highmark Health to codesign an AI-powered prior authorization solution at the point of care along with other innovative tools that integrate Abridge’s AI technology, the organizations said.
The health tech world also has been buzzing all week with rumors that Epic plans to launch its own AI scribe, an announcement that might come next week at the company’s annual User Group Meeting in Verona, Wisconsin.
Epic’s move to offer its own AI scribe, while not entirely surprising, does put pressure on AI startups.
Buduma believes Epic’s development of its own AI-powered clinical documentation tool is beneficial for the ecosystem.
“Epic releasing a solution for health systems, it establishes a baseline for what is table stakes for health system,” he told Fierce Healthcare. “I think because we’ve spent so much time building and configuring AI systems that work wall-to-wall at some of the most complex environments, such as the biggest academic medical centers, and actually get it to work and get highly utilized across specialties, in some ways, I think it’s going to simplify the competitive story for us. The gap is just going to become very clear as to what’s something that Epic can serve and will just be part of baseline Epic functionality versus what’s the right clinical grade and compliance grade of a product that an academic medical center needs,” he said.
“In some ways, it clarifies the the story of, ‘What’s the baseline solution that’s low cost, but also low ROI, and then what’s the high-value solution category in the market?’ In some ways, this competition from the EHRs is really good for the ecosystem,” he added.
Ambience says it supports more than 200 specialties. And, Buduma says its technology goes beyond just ambient listening as it incorporate additional aspects of the patient’s chart, such as prior notes and diagnostics, into the clinical note and offers downstream revenue cycle automation for coding, CDI and prior authorization.
“I think if you don’t have all those pieces together, integrated in one workflow, then it’s going to be difficult to differentiate. The way our customers work with us is much more expansive than just ambient listening,” he said.
Investors have poured nearly $1 billion into ambient AI companies so far in 2025, according to a Stat analysis.
Ambience Healthcare banked $243 million in series C funding late last month, marking one of the largest health tech raises so far in 2025. The funding boosted the company’s valuation to $1.25 billion.
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