hospital veteran HCA Healthcare The two organizations are deploying artificial intelligence-enabled medical dictation software in partnership with healthcare tech company Augmedics, the two organizations said Thursday.
Nashville, Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare will add dictation software for its acute care physicians. The AI solution will turn clinician-patient interactions into medical notes that physicians and nurses can review in real time before being transferred to electronic health record systems.
In addition to this collaboration, Augmedics raised $12 million in equity from HCA Healthcare and institutional healthcare investor Redmile Group through the issuance of new common shares and pre-funded warrants at $1.60 per share. Augmedics, which posted a net loss of $24.4 million in 2022, said this equity increase will help it reach cash flow stability.
Shares of Augmedics were trading at $3.10 per share on Thursday afternoon, a 70% increase from Wednesday’s close of $1.80.
The partnership is unique for Augmedics, which went public in 2021. Its previous work focused on ambulatory care, said Ian Shakeel, founder and chief strategy officer of Augmedics.
“Before HCA, we weren’t really in the hospital world,” Shakeel said. “It creates a whole new range of technical requirements to be on the emergency department grade from a timing perspective. Beyond that, the notes are fundamentally different.
According to Shakeel, the company used some of Google’s natural language processing artificial intelligence models to build this solution. He added that the partnership with Google has made it possible to work with the HCA.
While many providers are hesitant to partner with vendors outside of their EHRs, Shakeel said clinical documentation software solutions may underpin those broader trends. These technologies integrate naturally into EHR and physician workflows, he added. Additionally, this was not an area that many EHR vendors have shown interest in developing.
,[There are] Building this type of business requires so much capital and is so complex,” Shakeel said. “These are areas where EHR companies are creating ecosystems and allowing multiple winners to exist because They don’t really have best-of-breed solutions.”
The AI arms race could be heating up in the clinical documentation space. Nuance Communications, an Augmedics competitor owned by Microsoft, said last month Adding OpenAI’s ChatGPT successor GPT-4 to its latest application,
The application, called Dragon Ambient Experience Express, can use OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative AI capabilities to record interactions between physicians and patients directly into an electronic health record system.