Athenahealth Expands AI Documentation Technology With Abridge Partnership

Athenahealth is partnering with Abridge to integrate the company’s enhanced note-taking technology into its platform for clinicians, as the market for ambient scribing is becoming more crowded.

Abridge offers ambient note-taking, which is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology that listens to a patient and doctor conversation and generates structured medical notes. After a review by the doctor, these notes are added directly to a patient’s electronic health record.

The note-taking tool is also multilingual; it can record the patient-doctor conversation in one language and write it up in another language.

“Writing notes is something that has been a pain point for physicians since time began,” Paul Brient, chief product officer at Athenahealth, said in an interview with PYMNTS. “Artificial intelligence has gotten to the point now where it can listen to a provider-patient conversation and generate a note for the physician.”

Physicians often spend hours of their personal time catching up on medical notes — a phenomenon the industry calls “pajama time.”

Abridge’s technology will be incorporated into athenaOne, which is Athenahealth’s flagship cloud-based electronic health record (EHR), practice management and revenue cycle management platform designed for outpatient care.

Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered assistant that combines advanced voice dictation and ambient listening with generative AI. Called Dragon Copilot, the tool converts doctor and patient conversations into clinical summaries that can be integrated into electronic health records.

Microsoft is using the technology from Nuance, which it acquired in 2022. Brient said Nuance used to be the only game in town about three to four years ago, but the field has gotten crowded now with 40 to 50 vendors.

Athenahealth is one of the largest in this market, serving 160,000 providers or about 10% of U.S. healthcare providers, primarily in outpatient care.

Read more: Microsoft Unveils AI-Powered Voice Assistant to Alleviate Physician Burnout

Note-Taking to Diagnosis and Virtual Call Centers

Brient said the Abridge partnership represents one part of Athenahealth’s broader vision for AI in healthcare technology. The company is developing a platform where users get to customize their experience.

For example, Abridge is one of three note-taking services being offered on athenaOne. The other two are Suki and iScribe, and Athenahealth plans to add more. Brient wants to give physicians a choice on which note-taking service they want to use because everyone’s style is different.

Letting each physician in a practice choose the model that works best for them is a “much more flexible strategy,” he added. “We were pretty excited about the approach, and super excited to have Abridge join that approach.”

Athenahealth also has an app marketplace with more than 850 APIs for physicians to customize their tech experience.

Looking ahead, the arrival of generative and agentic AI can “dramatically change the clinician experience” in the realm of the electronic health record system, Brient said.

First, the note-taking AI can evolve into a technology that can pull out diagnoses from the patient-doctor conversation and even suggest medicine orders, shrinking the process into a single cognitive step, Brient said.

Second, Brient sees Athenahealth using AI to digitize outpatient documentation. Unlike in-patient hospital care, where everything is electronic, at clinics and other outpatient settings a lot of documents are in various forms: lab test faxes, medical forms, and the like.

“A lot of the data coming into the EHR is unstructured. We get a lot of faxes,” Brient said. “You’re dealing with a lot of vendors all over the place.”

He added that “the good thing about AI is it can actually read those faxes. It can pull all the data out and put them in discrete form,” or stored in a way for easy retrieval and analysis. So instead of the doctor having to read each individual lab test, AI can consolidate and analyze them.

Read more: Healthcare: Balancing AI’s Opportunities with Regulatory and Competition Considerations

Other AI Use Cases

Brient also sees AI making its revenue cycle management services more efficient. This includes managing billing, insurance claims and payments. “We can add agentic AI and the new LLMs [large language models] to do a lot of the work the humans are doing, which speeds it up.”

For example, a hospital gets a check from an insurance company but it doesn’t say for whom or why, Brient said. The hospital has to investigate by logging into the insurer’s web portal. AI agents can do that.

Another use case is to appeal coverage denials. An LLM can write an appeal letter that the AI agent can upload to the insurer’s portal. The human worker would click to submit the appeal.

Also, Brient sees AI taking over the communication between the doctor’s office and the patient — taking phone calls, scheduling appointments, refilling medication and the like.

AI will handle the routine tasks to help the human worker who might be overwhelmed trying to check people in and out of the clinic, he said.

“Big health systems are already doing that, but most of our clients are small, independent practices,” Brient added. “So we’re helping them, over the next year, to start doing that.”

He said he met with a company that uses AI agents as “nurses,” not to directly provide care, but to perform follow-ups like calling the patient to remind them they still need to get a certain lab test for their surgery. Brient can see Athenahealth acting as a “virtual call center” for doctors’ offices.

Adoption could increase as costs continue to fall. Brient said the cost for note-taking has fallen from $2,000 a month per doctor in the early days to $100 to $400 — and prices still keep declining.

“People have long joked that Dr. Google plays a big role in people’s healthcare lives,” he said. “I can imagine that Dr. ChatGPT will start to play a big role in people’s healthcare lives, officially or unofficially.”