University Hospital at Downstate is piloting an ambient artificial intelligence (AI) scribe with 50 physicians across family medicine, internal medicine, cardiology and the emergency department. The tool has drafted notes for more than 900 patient encounters since May, Altera Digital Health said on Tuesday (Sept. 22). The Brooklyn academic medical center is the first to use Sunrise Thread AI, which listens to the conversation and generates a structured clinical note inside the Sunrise electronic health record (EHR).
The physician reviews and approves the note before it enters the official record. From there, it feeds continued care, coding and billing. The work of reconstructing the visit afterward largely goes away.
Altera built Thread AI as a native part of its EHR rather than a bolt-on. The tool captures and interprets encounters from a desktop or phone. During the pilot, Downstate is tracking usability, transcription quality and the effect on documentation workflows, and Altera is building custom templates for its inpatient and emergency department physicians.
Dilip Nath, chief information officer at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, said the hospital found the tool “more robust than others while offering greater ease of use.” Demand from clinical staff remains high, he said.
Downstate serves about three million Brooklyn residents with more than 800 physicians across 53 specialties. Its rollout is small so far, but the workflow it tests is the one the rest of the industry is moving toward.
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Documentation Hours Fall Across Health Systems
PYMNTS reported in February that clinicians at the University of Chicago Medicine cut documentation time and burnout with ambient AI, and that Sharp HealthCare and MaineHealth saw less after-hours charting. The American Medical Association found that surveyed AI scribe programs saved about 15,000 clinician hours across participating health systems.
The Permanente Medical Group logged more than 2.5 million uses of its ambient scribe in a year and estimated 15,700 hours saved compared with nonusers, according to NEJM Catalyst. Intermountain Health saw a 27% drop in time spent in notes per appointment among clinicians using Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot for 10 or more encounters, the American Hospital Association reported.
The gains are uneven. A JAMA study of 1,800 physicians across five academic medical centers found doctors saved about 16 minutes of documentation time per eight hours of patient care, with inconsistent use across clinicians, STAT reported.
Vendors Push Past the Note into Billing
The note is becoming the front end of a longer chain. Abridge launched a pre-bill review tool on Sept. 14 for clinical documentation and coding teams that audits inpatient claims before submission, HIT Consultant reported. The pitch is to close the gap between the bedside encounter and the bill, which today can leave coders querying physicians weeks after discharge.
EHR vendors are embedding scribes directly. Athenahealth added Microsoft Dragon Copilot alongside Abridge and Suki in its marketplace, Fierce Healthcare reported. Altera’s Thread AI sits inside Sunrise the same way.
A note the physician approves once and the system carries through coding and billing is a different product from a faster transcript. Downstate plans to expand the rollout across its inpatient and emergency physicians as the custom templates come online.
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