Ambient AI technology that seamlessly integrates into the EHR to improve ED and inpatient documentation and clinical workflows
SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / April 28, 2025 / Ambience Healthcare, a leader in ambient AI technology, today announced that it is expanding its testing of ambient AI in two high-acuity care settings: emergency (ED) and inpatient care. This new engagement marks the release of Ambience's new care setting solutions to support ED and inpatient clinicians, building upon Ambience's 100+ specialty-tuned offerings.
Houston Methodist ED and inpatient clinicians leverage Ambience's new solutions in select environments to address the unique documentation and workflow challenges in health care settings, which are some of the most complex in medicine.
"As the burden of documentation and coding demands continues to expand across medicine, we are committed to finding new ways to relieve our encumbered clinicians with AI technology that enhances the patient-provider experience," said Jordan Dale, MD, CMIO and chief health AI officer at Houston Methodist. "We have seen the success of ambient AI in the ambulatory setting and are proud of this collaboration between Ambience and Houston Methodist that not only expands on this success but also offers an EHR-integrated solution for the inpatient setting -- a first-of-its-kind endeavor for a health system."
Transforming Emergency Medicine and Inpatient Workflows and Documentation
ED and inpatient environments have some of the most complex, non-linear care pathways and workflows in health care. ED clinicians consistently report the highest levels of burnout in the industry, complete an average of 4,000 clicks in the EHR during a busy shift, and hospitalists face similarly intricate workflows with wide-ranging patient acuity, frequent patient handoffs, and highly detailed, complex documentation needs - all while navigating complicated coding and billing requirements.
In the face of these challenges, Ambience built its new offerings in collaboration with Houston Methodist ED and inpatient clinicians to work with the unpredictable nature of the environments where they provide care knowing that generic or poorly integrated ambient AI solutions wouldn't meet the needs of these demanding settings. In initial pilots at Houston Methodist and other health systems, this AI technology has solved the challenge of unique documentation requirements, high-acuity patient panels and nonlinear workflows in acute care.
"We are seeing initial success in replacing many functions formerly done by scribes," adds Christopher Ziebell, MD, medical director of the Houston Methodist Emergency Department. "The technology is incredibly accurate, and we look forward to testing the full capabilities of the system now that it is fully Epic-integrated."
Key features of the new solutions deployed include:
Specialty-Specific, Contextualized Documentation: ED clinicians and hospitalists must capture different types of documentation throughout a patient's ED and hospital course. Ambience captures provider-patient conversations and gathers key details for admissions, discharge/disposition, medical decision-making, procedural documentation, and more; chart-aware documentation extracts information from relevant charts (labs, past notes, etc.), providing the necessary context for clinicians.
Coding Awareness: This AI technology is designed to understand specific coding needs of different care settings and drive downstream compliance, thereby reducing clinician cognitive load in selecting codes and reducing the risk of getting queried.
Streamlined Workflows: Smart dictation, context-aware patient and discharge summaries, and multi-speaker attribution are a few features that help acute care clinicians stay agile in juggling multiple patients and coordinating consults with care team members.
Seamless EHR Integration: Click mileage in acute care is already high; without an integrated solution, clinicians spend more clicks to copy-and-paste. Integrated through Patient Lists, patient information automatically populates into Ambience as soon as providers assign themselves a patient - no copy-pasting required for documentation. This not only reduces click mileage but also improves coding accuracy and workflow efficiency.
"Health care providers in emergency and inpatient settings face extraordinary documentation burdens that take time away from complex patient care," said Michael Ng, CEO of Ambience Healthcare. "We realize that to truly have impacted a health system, we had to go beyond the ambulatory setting. Without addressing acute care settings, we would not have comprehensively addressed the needs of our health system partners, ensuring clinicians in those environments could focus more fully on patients while enabling hospitals to capture the full value of care delivered."
For more information about Ambience's new ED and inpatient solutions, visit https://www.ambiencehealthcare.com/product.
About Ambience Healthcare
The mission of Ambience Healthcare is to supercharge clinicians with breakthrough ambient AI technology. Ambience has been deployed at major health systems and provider organizations across North America, including Cleveland Clinic, UCSF Health, St. Luke's Health System, Memorial Hermann Health System, and John Muir Health, among others. Founded in 2020 by Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma, Ambience is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has raised $100M in total funding from Kleiner Perkins, OpenAI Startup Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Optum Ventures, Human Capital, Martin Ventures, AIX Ventures, AirTree Ventures, John Doerr, Jeff Dean, Richard Socher, Pieter Abbeel, and others. To learn more, visit ambiencehealthcare.com.
About Houston Methodist
Houston Methodist is one of the nation's leading health systems and academic medical centers. The health system consists of nine hospitals: Houston Methodist Hospital, its flagship academic hospital in the Texas Medical Center, seven community hospitals and one long-term acute care hospital throughout the Greater Houston metropolitan area. Houston Methodist also includes a research institute; a comprehensive residency program; international patient services; freestanding comprehensive care, emergency care and imaging centers; and outpatient facilities. Houston Methodist employs more than 34,000 people and had more than 2.2 million outpatient visits and more than 148,000 admissions in 2024. For more information on Houston Methodist, see www.houstonmethodist.org.
Media Contacts
Karina Stabile
Aria Marketing for Ambience Healthcare
kstabile@ariamarketing.com
516-317-5835
Laureen Lucas for Houston Methodist
llucas@llpublicrelations.com
832-671-8787
SOURCE: Ambience
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