There’s a lot of benefits to incorporating an AI scribe into your facility or private practice, but how do you know which one is for you?
Many medical professionals are rapidly incorporating AI into their daily functions. Whether they’re working in a hospital, or are seeing patients at an inpatient facility, AI is assisting practitioners in all healthcare fields. One of the most popular ways that AI is making daily tasks easier and more efficient for providers is with ambient medical scribes. These applications are easy to use and are designed to integrate into many EHR systems for a seamless syncing of essential health information. AI scribes are giving back precious time to clinicians as well, helping them to stay present with their patients, reducing burnout from charting, and decreasing errors in patient notes.
There’s a lot of benefits to incorporating an AI scribe into your facility or private practice, but how do you know which one is for you? There are a lot of ambient medical scribes out there, designed to help healthcare professionals provide the best care possible for patients. In this article, we’re going to break down:
Playback Health has its roots back in 2007 when neurosurgeon Dr. David Langer had the idea to record patient visits so they could reference the information from their encounter and know exactly what their care instructions were. He teamed up with a long-time friend Greg Odland, whose recent accident left him at a loss about his care instructions, in 2018 to create Playback Health. This medical scribe offers cloud-based AI solutions that have a real impact on the daily lives of clinicians and patients.
Founded in 2018
Playback Health is transforming how doctors care for their patients in the digital age. Their easy to use platform offers a robust AI-driven documentation and syncing system. Their digital toolkit includes an ambient medical scribe designed to increase note accuracy and give providers more time with their patients. It has also automated the patient journey, ensuring that appointments, checking in and out, patient reminders, as well as follow up requests are taken care of automatically.
Using Playback Health brings greater efficiency to healthcare facilities because it has streamlined workflows, increased accuracy, and ensures better communication among staff and patients.
“It has been a revolutionary and game-changing experience for my office workflow! The ambient AI service has increased the number of patients seen during the day and reduced the charting burden significantly.” -Sanjeev J. Suratwala, MD, MBA, Syosset Hospital - Northwell Health
“Playback's Ai scribe has helped me kickstart my practice and has been a competitive advantage for me when my patients shop for care.” -Dr. Griffin Baum, MD, NEUROSURGEON, NORTHWELL
The three co-founders of Heidi include Dr. Tom Kelly, Waleed Mussa, and Yu Liu who were confident AI could help clinicians get back to what they really want to do—take care of patients and reduce administrative tasks. Through the help of funding from partners, they were able to create an easy to use AI scribe that takes the painful reality of accurate note taking off of providers’ plates.
Since 2019
Heidi has been trying to solve the problem of reducing administrative tasks from the get-go, and has created a very easy to use interface that gives clinicians a lot of their time back to concentrate on clinical duties. This AI scribe transcribes notes, includes templates, and offers macros to speed up charting even more. You can ask Heidi to customize your note and even add addendums as the encounter progresses. Heidi also provides a completely free tier of their service for individuals, although its output is limited.
“Heidi health truly captures the work I do with clients and allows me to get home earlier while meeting professional noting standards.” -Lisa Terwilliger, Therapist, US
“It has saved me so much time with documentation, I am able to spend that time with my patients rather than spending the time dictating or typing my notes.” -Shelbie Scharf, Family Medicine, US
Contact Abridge for customized pricing - this usually means it's expensive and requires a lot of paperwork.
Dr. Shiv Rao is the CEO of Abridge, who wanted to build an AI scribe that would allow healthcare professionals to provide the same level of personalized care to patients at a much larger enterprise-level scale.
Since 2018
Abridge is designed to transform medical note taking, and it integrates directly with the EHR system (including Epic) for seamless syncing. It is very useful in large healthcare enterprise systems, and can work easily across multiple facilities. The new Abridge Contextual Reasoning Engine was designed to produce more useful billable notes directly at the point of care, streamlining and improving the often-delayed billing process.
“The technology is designed to fit easily into our teams’ day-to-day workflows inside Epic and will help us better serve our patients by eliminating the burden of clinical documentation that can detract from patient-clinician interactions.” -Laura Wilt Chief Digital Officer Sutter Health
“With Abridge, our providers will be able to spend less time on documentation and more time engaging directly with their patients.” -Matt Kull, EVP, Chief Information and Digital Officer
Nuance and Microsoft have teamed up to offer an impressive addition to the AI scribe market. Image courtesy of HIT Consultant.
Contact Nuance for customized pricing, meaning pricing is probably high.
Although Nuance got its start in the 1990s, it recently was acquired by Microsoft in 2021 to offer AI powered solutions for healthcare professionals.
Founded in 1992 as Nuance Communications by Mark Benjamin.
Using the power of Microsoft applications like Dragon Copilot and Dragon Medical One, Nuance offers clinicians a wide suite of tools to help them enhance patient care and streamline their workflow. The tools in this application enhance productivity and connectivity among team members, as well as providing better, more personalized patient care. Nuance assists providers by providing accurate transcriptions of notes, and can provide them with better insights based on data to improve care.
“One of the things that’s helped providers, including myself, become more efficient and save even more time with Dragon Medical One are the shortcuts that do repetitive actions a lot faster than finding and clicking on things or typing in long paragraphs of text.” -Clinton Hull, MD, Medical Director of Clinical Informatics, Singing River Health System
Contact Suki for customized pricing
Suki was founded in 2017 by CEO Punit Soni, who wanted to solve the problem of physician burnout. Suki’s mission is to provide easy to use tools and applications to help lift this burden from providers so they can concentrate on patient care.
Since 2017
Suki AI has three solutions to help healthcare facilities improve note taking, streamline administrative tasks, and help reduce provider burnout—Suki Assistant, Suki Compose, and Suki Platform. All of their applications harness the power of AI to provide accurate transcriptions, sync with EHRs, provide diagnosis coding, and offer real-time information retrieval. It is an easy scribe to deploy, and clinicians report increased efficiency, good ROI, more capacity for patients, and quicker time to revenue.
“The technology and accuracy of Suki is mindblowing. My notes have always been very wordy and its ambient technology captures the essence both accurately and concisely.” Dr. Ana Urukalo, Podiatry, Elite Foot and Ankle
“Not only are we saving mental energy and time, we’re now able to better focus on patient care and build more engaged, meaningful relationships with our patients.” -Dr. Stefan Huber, Family Medicine, Tinovus Health
Freed wants to give providers more freedom from tedious medical documentation. Image courtesy of Freed.
The Freed founder and CEO is Erez Druk, who got the idea for a healthcare scribe that would free up practitioners and reduce burnout from his wife, who is a physician. This AI application is called Freed because that is at the heart of what the operating team strives to do—to make providers happier and to give more freedom back to anyone who is buried under administrative tasks like notes.
Since 2023
The Freed team makes it clear that their one goal is to improve the happiness of providers, and to be the most clinician-focused AI scribe in the world. When healthcare professionals can focus more on their patients’ well-being instead of filling out notes, they tend to be a lot more productive and have more capacity for patients. Freed’s AI is able to completely take away the task of manually entering notes and easily integrates them into an EHR. It learns how you like to format notes, offers templates, and suggestions to clinicians.
“I can actually sit and make eye contact with my patients and their parents and interact with them, without having to worry about keeping track of all of the details.” -Liz F., Pediatric ER MD
“Freed.AI has made me much more attentive to my clients...more importantly, I'm not writing down stuff, I'm not distracted by any of that or stressing about the note I have to do before or after.” -Steve B., Mental Health Counseling
Tali AI was co-founded by Mahshid Yassaei and Hesam Dadafarin, both of whom have years of experience in the healthcare industry. From the beginning they have used their expertise to change how clinicians engage with technology at the point of care.
Since 2020
There’s no list of clients, want me to just leave this out?
Tali AI is a voice-enabled AI assistant that can help providers create notes via the AI scribe, dictate notes and addendums, do medical searches, as well as use voice commands to set reminders or open documents/forms. It supports multiple languages and can easily pick up medical terminology. The Tali AI dictation software is 3x faster than typing, so notes are finished in minutes, giving providers more time to spend on their patients. The medical search features allows practitioners to ask questions from trusted medical databases like Merk Manuals and Open FDA.
“Having tried a few I decided to go with Tali. It was the most intuitive and provided notes the way I like them. I agree with the comments regarding decreasing cognitive load.” -Mikael Levesque
DeepScribe helps providers focus on care, instead of documenting notes. Image courtesy of Facebook.
Contact DeepScribe for customized pricing
DeepScribe was founded in 2017 by Akilesh Bapu and Matthew Ko to help alleviate the strain medical documentation was taking on providers, which resulted in a negative impact on patient care. They are using AI to transform the way clinicians take notes, so they’re more focused during encounters, and don’t need to worry constantly about documentation.
Since 2017
The DeepScribe medical AI scribe is designed to accurately transcribe patient encounters and transform them into customizable notes that are easily synced with EHR systems. All providers need to do is approve the note, which can be done in minutes, allowing them to focus more on the patient. This AI scribe has shown to reduce documentation time by as much as 75%, and notes can be completed in as little as 1.6 minutes. This means not only better care for patients, but more rest time in between patients, which reduces practitioner burnout.
“We went with DeepScribe to decrease physician burden and improve communication and relationships in the clinic.” -Medical Director, Board member, Texas Oncology
“I say hello, I put [my phone] down, and I forget about it. It is literally just me and the patient and I am focused and I am there. Then, I walk out of the room, hit a little button and I have a note.” -Emily Carter, Nurse Practitioner, Texas Oncology
When it comes to choosing an ambient AI scribe, it’s all about finding one that assists you with what you actually need. It should seamlessly integrate into your schedule, and not be something extra that takes more time to learn. Any of these AI scribes we discussed would be a great addition to your practice, it’s all about finding one that works with your budget and meets the needs of clinicians in your facility. Although our vote for the top AI scrribe overall is the Playback app, you should still consider all of these companies on our list when doing your research.
