Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence<\/a> startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.<\/p>\n Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI<\/a> to build the new model.<\/p>\n The startup is part of a fiercely competitive<\/a> market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n “We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview. <\/a>“What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”<\/p>\n More CNBC health coverage<\/p>\n Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.<\/p>\n “If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”<\/p>\n Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund.\u00a0<\/p>\n