Digital Event Horizon
Revolutionizing Healthcare: How Ambience Healthcare is Disrupting the Status Quo. In an effort to improve healthcare efficiency and effectiveness, a new startup called Ambience Healthcare has been making waves with its AI-powered platform that automates routine tasks for clinicians before, during, and after patient visits. By saving time on documentation, reducing burnout, and increasing access to clinical information, Ambience is poised to revolutionize the healthcare industry.
Ambience Healthcare is developing an AI-powered platform to automate routine tasks for clinicians in healthcare. The founders, Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma, were inspired by their personal experiences with the US healthcare system and its inefficiencies. The company aims to democratize access to clinical information and make expertise more accessible across the country. Ambience's platform has been shown to save clinicians time on documentation, reduce burnout, and improve patient relationships.
In an effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare services, a new startup called Ambience Healthcare has been making waves in the medical community. Founded by two MIT alumni, Mike Ng MBA '16 and Nikhil Buduma '17, the company is developing an AI-powered platform that automates routine tasks for clinicians before, during, and after patient visits.
The founders' journey into healthcare began with a personal experience. In 2012, Ng fractured his back and was misdiagnosed and put on the wrong care plan. This experience taught him about the U.S. healthcare system, including how most clinicians spend their days documenting visits, selecting billing codes, and completing other administrative tasks. The average clinician spends only 27 percent of their time on direct patient care, leaving the remaining 73 percent for paperwork and bureaucratic tasks.
Ng's interest in entrepreneurship led him to attend the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he met Buduma. They became fast friends and took classes together, including "Building an Entrepreneurial Venture" and "Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures." During their time at MIT, they developed an appreciation for the challenges that healthcare organizations face.
Buduma had also experienced firsthand the struggles of navigating the U.S. medical system as a child immigrant with persistent health issues. He watched his parents struggle to understand the system and seek appropriate care. This experience shaped his perspective on healthcare and fueled his passion for creating innovative solutions.
After completing their degrees, Ng and Buduma founded their first company in San Francisco – Remedy Health – which operated its own AI-powered healthcare platform. During this time, they gained an inside look at advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and developed an appreciation for the challenges that healthcare organizations face.
Their experience with Remedy also introduced them to Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, who led a research group to invent the transformer architecture. Ng and Buduma were among the first to put transformers into production to support their own clinicians at Remedy. Subsequently, several of their friends went on to start the large language model group within OpenAI.
The experience also reinforced their understanding that general-purpose models needed to be fine-tuned for each area of medicine. To address this challenge, they founded Ambience Healthcare, which aims to democratize access to clinical information and make expertise more accessible across the country.
Ambience's AI-powered platform is being used across roughly 40 large institutions in the U.S., including UCSF Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, St. Luke's Health System, John Muir Health, and others. Clinicians leverage Ambience in dozens of languages and over 100 specialties and subspecialties, in settings such as emergency departments, hospital inpatient settings, and oncology wards.
The platform handles pre-charting and real-time AI scribing, assists with navigating the thousands of rules to select the right insurance billing codes, and sends after-visit summaries to patients and their families in different languages. These features have been shown to save clinicians two to three hours per day on documentation, reduce levels of burnout, and develop higher-quality relationships with their patients.
The founders believe that Ambience is not just improving productivity but also helping the healthcare system manage a chronic shortage of clinicians expected to grow in coming years. In health care, access remains a significant problem, with rural Americans facing a 40 percent higher risk of preventable hospitalization attributed to a lack of access to specialty care.
Ng and Buduma's vision is to make expertise at major academic medical centers more democratized across the U.S. through an AI infrastructure layer. As these models become more clinically intelligent, they hope to help scale the knowledge of leading specialists in the country, thereby increasing access to high-quality clinical information for patients across the nation.
Related Information:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/ambience-equips-doctors-with-ai-co-pilots-1016
Published: Wed Oct 16 14:33:40 2024 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
