Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Corewell Health inked a partnership with Abridge, an artificial intelligence company focused on clinical documentation.
The 21-hospital health system began searching for a clinical documentation technology partner around 18 months ago and did a few small licensing pilots to figure out which company would make the biggest impact. What would be worth the cost? The initial pilots had mixed results.
Then, Corewell's venture group brought in Abridge.
Corewell and Abridge partnered for a 90-day pilot program with a select group of about 100 providers and found 90% reported a significant increase in the undivided attention they were able to give to patients. They also reported spending 48% less time on after-hours documentation each week, dropping from 4.3 hours to 2.2 hours.
"The response has been very positive," Jason Joseph, chief digital and information officer at Corewell Health, told Becker's. "It is intuitive. Physicians didn't require a lot of training to be productive. The voice model was accurate right out of the box, even with some people who had accents."
The providers in the pilot considered the technology "game-changing" because they could spend less time documenting and more time having a conversation with patients. The technology also gave clinicians time back with their families instead of documentation after hours.
Given the results, Corewell Health has decided to roll out the technology platform to thousands of physicians across the health system. Mr. Joseph expects the Abridge technology to continue improving as its functionality is enhanced and further integrated within Corewell's Epic platform.
"We've spent the last couple of years really bringing our technology foundation together so we can operate on the same platform ecosystem," said Mr. Joseph. "We're an Epic-first organization, which means we always look to our core platforms first for capabilities. As we do that, it becomes a whole lot easier to take a technology like this and spread it across our entire base system. We're always going to look first for opportunities that fit within our common technology foundation."
Medical directors, physician leaders and operational leaders across Corewell are leading the expanded rollout of the technology, ensuring the right physician champions are engaged along the way. Corewell Health's vice president of informatics has also been instrumental in onboarding the Abridge platform.
And the transition couldn't come at a better time.
"We've got a significant increase in projected [patient] demand coming our way in the years ahead," said Mr. Joseph. "As the population ages, our clinical workforce is certainly going to be challenged more and more. We've added a lot of different things over the last decade, whether it's regulatory burden or documentation burden or technology. These are things that are needed to make the health care system work, but aren't necessarily helpful for the caregiver at the point of care."
What the system can do is reduce the administrative burden on clinicians whenever possible. Abridge's technology is one example that allows physicians to lean more into patient care.
"We are anticipating an increase in provider and patient satisfaction which will also hopefully reduce burnout from our physicians, and just provide a better overall care experience," said Mr. Joseph. "That's what we're hoping to see, and we're going to watch a variety of metrics along the way. But mostly, we're hopeful that this is going to lessen the burden our providers have to deal with on a daily basis."
Mr. Joseph's team was surprised at how relatively easy it was to deploy Abridge's platform across the system and experiment to gain value more quickly than some other investments.
"It's rare that a CIO gets a thank you note from a physician, but in this case the technology actually elicited that," said Mr. Joseph. "And when you get a positive letter from a physician related to technology, it's a good day."