As Oracle and Epic march toward a head-on battle for supremacy in the huge market for electronic health records, the bromide about how “what got you here won’t get you there” will provide a stark example of why niche providers that dominated the on-prem world will be overmatched and pushed to the periphery in the modern world of cloud and AI.
Ambient AI medical scribes are about the easiest — and hottest — way into healthcare for AI-based startups. Just take a look at this graphic that lists 35 companies who are (or at one point were) trying to use ambient voice for translating the audio of doctors’ visits into written notes. The area is both well within the capabilities of AI tools and also — theoretically — doesn't directly affect patient care. While the number of health systems looking into contracting with an AI scribe company is growing, analysts anticipate that the bubble will eventually burst and the field will contract. Cracks are already showing: Last fall, Robin Healthcare, an AI-aided charting and reimbursement platform, quietly went under. Earlier this year, longtime ambient medical scribe company Augmedix — the only publicly traded company in this area — went private when it was acquired by Commure.
The top eight cloud platform service providers own 97 percent share of the global market, with AI and generative AI technologies becoming key to winning customers.
The company behind ChatGPT didn't set out to tackle health care. But despite ongoing concerns about its technology's tendency to hallucinate, OpenAI is already inking deals with health care customers desperate to use it to speed up workflows without burdening their staff. OpenAI sells secure, enterprise commercial licenses for ChatGPT and its API to a range of health customers. Early adopters tell STAT they're aware of generative AI's risks, and are careful not to let it dispense medical advice directly to patients — instead, they're harnessing its ability to draw from disparate data sources to generate coherent responses in narrowly-defined settings: summarizing medical records, suggesting treatment plans, or distilling medical jargon into plain language.