AI-native clinical documentation startup Ambience Healthcare raises $243M – News

Ambience Healthcare Inc., a provider of ambient artificial intelligence documentation tools, said today it has closed on $243 million in Series C funding, bringing its total amount raised to date to more than $345 million.

It’s one of the biggest funding rounds in the healthcare technology industry so far this year. It was led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors, including OpenAI’s Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Optum Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, Town Hall Ventures, Smash Capital, Georgian and Founders Circle Capital also participated in the round.

The startup has developed a powerful AI platform that’s used by healthcare providers for things like documentation, coding and organizing clinical workflows. It’s built atop proprietary AI reasoning models that have been fine-tuned to handle the regulatory, operational and clinical demands of the healthcare industry. By integrating with each healthcare provider’s electronic healthcare records system, it goes beyond simple transcriptions, generating accurate, compliant and specialty-aware clinical notes and codes in real time.

For example, Ambience Healthcare’s platform can be used to record patient appointments, automate documentation and take comprehensive medical notes during physician’s consultations with patients, utilizing its ambient listening tools. It can also prepare clinicians before each appointment, providing them with an AI-generated chart summary of their existing medical records.

The technology goes further, with built-in features such as an ICD-10 assistant and real-time compliance engine. It also generates customized, after-visit summaries for each patient.

For healthcare administrators, Ambience’s platform helps to standardize workflows across coding, quality assurance, clinical documentation improvement, prior authorizations and utilization management, generating complete and compliant documentation in real time.

It integrates directly with any major EHR system, providing support for more than 200 specialities, including complex and under-served domains such as psychiatry, oncology and emergency medicine, adapting to the unique context of each healthcare setting without requiring any staff retraining or workflow redesigns.

Ambience Healthcare Chief Executive Michael Ng said documentation has long been one of the major sources of friction for healthcare providers, but his company is turning it into a source of strength. “[We are] transforming how clinicians deliver care, how administrators run operations and how patients experience the system,” he insisted.

Ambience’s platform is already being used by major healthcare systems including John Muir Health, Cleveland Clinic, Houston Methodist and Arizona-based Onvida Health, plus the women’s virtual care provider Midi Health Inc.

Midi Health said it was able to increase its number of clinicians and extend its offerings in menopause care, weight management and survivorship support, as a result of using Ambience’s software.

In the case of the Cleveland Clinic, it has recently signed a five-year contract with Ambience Healthcare following a successful six-month pilot project where it pitted its software against four other AI-powered healthcare documentation platforms. It tested the five platforms for documentation quality, product features, ease of implementation, provider satisfaction and return on investment.

The extensive tests revealed some major differences in the quality of the clinical documentation generated by the five platforms, said Beth Meese, executive director of digital health at the Cleveland Clinic, in an interview with Fierce Healthcare. “We realized that the underlying technology of some of them was significantly better than the others, and that was a surprise,” she explained.

Looking forward, Ambience Healthcare wants to use the funding to bring its AI platform to more healthcare providers and enhance its product capabilities.

Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Julie Yoo pointed out that her company has been backing Ambience Healthcare since its seed funding round, having identified its potential to integrate with numerous clinical workflows.

“In a space that’s now crowded with point solutions, Ambience has executed impressively over the years by expanding into a robust platform, grounded in real clinical needs, tailored to subspecialties, delivering clear value to health systems,” she said.

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