Why Mount Sinai Chose Microsoft Over Abridge and Suki Leave a comment
Leaders at Mount Sinai Health System in New York think Microsoft is the winner of the ambient scribing world — for now.
The health system began rolling out Microsoft’s ambient listening technology, called Dragon Copilot, in November. The tool listens to clinician-patient conversations during visits and automatically generates clinical notes, which doctors can quickly review, edit and sign off on in the EHR.
The deployment is happening in phases, with roughly 500 doctors using the tool today. Mount Sinai’s goal is for 1,500 users to be onboarded by the spring, said Robbie Freeman, the health system’s chief digital transformation officer.
He noted that other members of the clinical care team, not just doctors, will receive access to the tool as part of the rollout, such as nurse practitioners, physician assistants and pharmacists.
The deployment is currently primarily in ambulatory settings, with some emergency department and urgent care usage. But as time goes on, the technology will move more into acute care environments, Freeman added.
From the data Mount Sinai has collected so far, it’s too early to tell whether the tool has significantly reduced the hours that doctors spend on documentation, he said.
“The jury is still out. We have been looking at things like the quality of documentation, what we’re capturing. Some organizations are saying, ‘just try and fit in more and more visits.’ That’s not how we’re looking at it. We’re looking at it really holistically — improving the quality. When we improve the quality of the documentation, that means we can get credit for everything going on, and we can get reimbursed appropriately. So that helps with having a sustainable business case,” Freeman explained.
Mount Sinai is also “thinking deeply” about how this technology can become more of a seamless experience across different care settings.
“So an example of that is, as we renovate our hospital rooms, we believe that we’ll be able to bring in ambient listening, like you’ll see today, but also things like vision AI to help support quality, safety and patient experience,” Freeman remarked.
Another item on the roadmap is adding insurance-related functions — such as the ability to submit prior authorization requests for certain tests and procedures — to the Microsoft deployment. Mount Sinai has raised its hand to be an early adopter once these capabilities are ready, Freeman said.
Before choosing Microsoft, Mount Sinai evaluated the company alongside two other vendors in the crowded ambient scribe space, running short pilots and gathering feedback via qualitative surveys given to the clinicians who tested the tools. Lisa Stump, Mount Sinai’s chief digital information officer, named the two other vendors: Abridge and Suki.
“At the time, Suki was in a different place technically, and so we weren’t actually able to launch a full-fledged pilot. They’ve come a long way since, but our timing was such that it didn’t align. And Microsoft and Abridge were relatively close,” she stated.
Mount Sinai then had to make a business decision based on contractual terms and shared partnership goals, and Microsoft ended up edging out Abridge, Stump explained.
She also noted that Mount Sinai has been “totally transparent” with Microsoft that their partnership may change given Epic’s launch of a built-in AI charting tool earlier this month.
“We will evaluate the Epic solution. They are our partner in the platform as well. We think the market will continue to evolve, and we’ll evaluate those options, but we’re incredibly grateful for all of the partnership and the innovation that got the entire market to the place that it is,” Stump declared.
Photo: Abraham Gonzalez Fernandez, Getty Images
