Athenahealth says open ecosystem is core to EHR integration 

How Ambient Notes works  

Since the two companies partnered together seven years ago, clinicians have used Athenahealth's Ambient Notes in more than 60,000 encounters to document patient visits, according to a press release. The integration of Suki's ambient technology aims to help clinicians with clinical documentation, coding, patient summaries and staging orders.   

"Now we have a world where the EHR can be fully intelligent, and it can understand the totality of what's going on with the patient," Brient said.  

Suki said so far more than 2,000 clinicians have reduced their time spent on administrative tasks and reduced after-hours clinical documentation, with Suki Assistant generating more than 2 million clinical encounters, according to the company. The tool is also available via the AthenaOne mobile app.   

In a press release, Dr. Janelle Smith, an internal medicine primary care provider at Springfield Health Clinic in Illinois, shared that she no longer spends time on documentation in the clinic on weekends because she can now use Ambient Notes for "close to 90-100 percent same-day note completion."

Despite the improvements to a physician’s workflow, ambient AI adoption is still a challenge, according to Brient. However, the benefits may eventually increase usage. He said Ambient Notes, for example, makes it easier for physicians to write notes sooner rather than putting them off, which can speed up their revenue cycle and allow them to bill more promptly.

"The EHR can be there as a helpful companion along the side and can take care of all the administrative work and get things documented, and [the more that it can] keep the physician out of compliance trouble or coding trouble, or whatever kind of trouble that the administrative work might impose upon them, the better," Brient said.   

An open ecosystem for EHRs  

With several companies in the Athenahealth Marketplace. Brient said the EHR provider aims to avoid a "walled garden" in which vendors are restricted to work with a particular application.   

"It's a very dynamic market that has not settled down in any sort of clear way, but that's exciting," Brient said. "That's what innovation is all about." 

Being an open platform means publishing application programming interfaces to everybody, according to Brient.   

"I think the key to successful partnerships and an accessible marketplace like we have is integration and being open," Brient says.   

Brient noted the federal government requires companies to have a certain number of FHIR APIs to enable interoperability. Other efforts at interoperability include Electronic Data Interchange transactions and HL7. With all the "nonstandard" formats for exchanging data, it's a "a mess to make work," Brient says.   

"Think about the history of interoperability with healthcare and how many acronyms we've had to go through just to exchange clinical data," Brient said. He mentioned regional health information organizations, community health information networks and health information exchanges as examples.   

The key to the partnership between Athenahealth and Suki is providing an integration that is more than just a tech add-on, according to Soni.   

"It's a reimagining of how documentation should work — fluid, effortless and fully integrated into the clinical workflow," Soni says.  

Athenahealth has about 40 major initiatives that incorporate AI. They include using AI to pick diagnosis codes, summarize information and fill out authorization forms as well as helping providers respond to patient queries.  

Athenahealth plans to add additional AI partners to maintain its open ecosystem.   

"Our marketplace is open for any and all AI players to come," Brient said.

Brian T. Horowitz started covering health IT news in 2010 and the tech beat overall in 1996.