Ambience Healthcare's OpenAI-Powered Medical Coding Model Outperforms Physicians by 27%

Ambience announces OpenAI-powered medical coding model that outperforms physicians

Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter. Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%. Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model. The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. 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. 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. "We're not replacing doctors or coders," Brendan Fortuner, Ambience's head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview. "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."

An AI-Powered Startup Can Now Perform This Important Task Better Than Doctors

A healthtech startup has used OpenAI's technology to develop a new, customized AI model that they claim can outperform real physicians at generating accurate medical codes and notes. Ambience Healthcare, a San Francisco-based company that provides healthcare workers with an AI-powered platform, says that its new model is specifically designed to identify ICD-10 codes, which are used to classify diseases and medical conditions for billing and record-keeping purposes. By recording a doctor-patient conversation, the AI model can intuit the conditions being discussed and generate notes with accurate codes. From corporate giants like Amazon, which recently launched AI tools for medical practitioners, to startups like Suki AI, businesses large and small are creating AI-powered products aimed at helping doctors and clinicians spend less time on administrative work, like writing and filing medical notes. According to a 2024 study published by Google Cloud and The Harris Poll, clinicians spend an average of nearly 28 hours per week on administrative tasks, and 94 percent of them say their administrative workloads prevent them from spending more time helping patients. In a press release, Ambience chief medical officer William H. Morris said that its platform can be understood "as a scribe that fluently speaks both clinical language and the intricate healthcare billing rulebook from day one." In addition to helping clinicians finalize their notes faster, he claims, it will also ensure that "revenue cycle teams receive cleaner, more accurate, and audit-ready charts."