For the past couple of years, clinicians have been singing the praises of generative AI-powered clinical documentation tools, saying that these models give them hours back into their day.
Industry leaders agree that these tools are effective for reducing administrative burden among clinical staff, but they’re still figuring out if ambient AI has a financial ROI. In March, the Peterson Health Technology Institute released a report examining this issue — and it stated that there isn’t much evidence to prove AI scribes have a positive financial impact.
However, one health system is saying that clinical documentation AI does in fact have a strong ROI. Riverside Health — a system in Virginia with five acute care hospitals and three specialty hospitals — recently announced that it has seen an increase in revenue and net margins as a result of adopting Abridge’s ambient AI technology.
Abridge’s tool listens to doctor-patient conversations and automatically creates clinical notes, alleviating physicians’ burnout and improving their documentation accuracy. The technology helps ensure that important details are captured and properly coded for billing, explained Dr. Shiv Rao, the startup’s CEO.
Rao, who still practices as a cardiologist at UPMC, knows firsthand that physicians typically have detailed, in-depth conversations with dozens of patients each day. But clinicians rarely get the chance to accurately document just how detailed those interactions were because they are drowning in various tasks and responsibilities — a problem that negatively impacts both the clinical record and reimbursement, he explained.
“In this country, you don’t get compensated for the care that you deliver. You get compensated for the care that you document that you deliver,” Rao declared.
Riverside began deploying Abridge’s solution last May, and it is now reporting a 14% increase in HCC diagnoses documented per encounter. This means Riverside is identifying more risk-adjusting conditions during patient visits, which leads to more accurate reimbursement and better-aligned care plans, noted Charles Frazier, the health system’s chief medical information and innovation officer.
He also noted that Abridge’s technology has led to an 11% increase in work relative value units (wRVUs) for Riverside physicians. A wRVU is a metric used to measure the amount of effort, skill and time a physician spends on patient care, and it helps determine how much providers get paid for their services.
In addition to helping boost Riverside’s revenue, Abridge’s tool also delivered the result that is more commonly expected from clinical documentation tools: reduced clinician burnout.
“We did a survey before the pilot started, and it showed that 61% of those providers expressed some degree of burnout, which is pretty much what the national average is. Thirty days in, that had dropped down to 27.7% — and that’s what convinced our leadership to say, ‘We need to make this available to folks,’” Frazier said.
Riverside’s pilot initially began with 30 physicians across both primary care and specialties, but the deployment has since expanded to hundreds of clinicians, he stated.
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