Message from Ian Shakil
Augmedix Founder, Director, and Chief Strategy Officer
When I first founded the company in 2012, ambient documentation solutions within health systems did not exist. We pioneered the space to fill this important gap and pioneered the practice of ambient documentation in the ambulatory setting. It is incredibly fulfilling to look back and see how far we have come.
Now, our products are not only being used by four of the nation’s ten leading health systems, but our technology is one of the most widely used of any ambient medical documentation solutions. And yet, there are many clinicians who are still unnecessarily spending two to three hours a day on their medical notes.
Today, I am thrilled to share another step forward in our journey with the announcement of our latest collaboration with HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud to reimagine clinician experiences using generative artificial intelligence (AI). Augmedix Go, our newest ambient medical documentation product, will use Google’s generative AI technology. HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers, will be one of the first health systems to introduce Augmedix Go to its clinicians.
Our collaboration with HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud is a manifestation of our mission to bring ambient documentation to even more care settings, including acute care settings. We aim to positively impact as many clinicians as possible, helping doctors and patients form a human connection at the point of care without the obvious intrusion of technology. This product and collaboration could have a powerful impact on operations and improve efficiency, allowing clinicians to spend more time at the bedside with their patients.
Our products use ambient AI technology to create accurate and timely medical notes from clinician-patient conversations. Augmedix Go, which will be commercially available later this year, produces a fully automated draft medical note in real time for the clinician to review, edit and approve.
How does our Augmedix technology work? Our technology stack captures the conversation between a clinician and patient in the background and extracts the necessary medical information. The Augmedix platform then leverages our proprietary natural language processing (NLP) models and structured data sets, along with Google Cloud’s multi-party speech-to-text (SST) processing and generative AI technology, to convert the conversation into a medical note. Once reviewed and finalized by the clinician, the medical notes are transferred to the electronic health record (EHR).
Overall, this process is expected to save clinicians a significant amount of time and ensure all relevant information is properly documented to enable an optimal continuum of patient care. It’s also important to note that while generative AI technology is a powerful tool, we place high importance on using LLMs responsibly and having tight guardrails in place to ensure reliability and patient safety. We also take compliance and information risk management very seriously, as the protection of patient information and data is a top priority when developing our products.
Our collaboration with Google Cloud and HCA Healthcare is critical as a growing number of clinicians are reporting increasing time spent on documentation requirements, which is limiting the amount of time they can spend with their patients.
Michael J. Schlosser, MD, MBA, FAANS, SVP Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I), HCA Healthcare, expressed, “We’re on a mission to redesign the way care is delivered, letting clinicians focus on patient care and using technology where it can best support doctors and nurses. Generative AI and other new technologies are helping us transform the ways teams interact, create better workflows, and have the right team, at the right time, empowered with the information they need for our patients.”
Deepening this collaboration, HCA Healthcare made a strategic investment in Augmedix earlier this year. Moreover, HCA Healthcare has been piloting our ambient medical documentation products with 75 emergency room physicians at four HCA Healthcare hospitals to quickly and more easily document key medical information from conversations during patient visits.
Experts from HCA Healthcare’s CT&I team, along with the Google Cloud and Augmedix teams, continue to work closely with physicians to refine the solution, and HCA Healthcare plans to expand its use to more hospitals later this year. While the companies are in the process of collecting measurement data, physicians in the pilot program have reported strong overall satisfaction.
To read the press release announcing the news about the Augmedix collaboration with Google Cloud and HCA Healthcare, click here.