Ambience Healthcare has rolled out Chart Chat for Nursing, touting it as the first electronic health record-integrated artificial intelligence conversation tool for inpatient nurses.
The tool is derived from the EHR and allows nurses to ask questions against a patient’s medical record, with each answer paired with a full citation, the company said in a press release. Nurses can ask simple questions based on physician progress notes, hospital policies, documentation, orders, recent test results, and more. Executives said this new feature is the company’s first step in its nursing-specific roadmap with new features planned for the future.
Cleveland Clinic will be the first health system to pilot the program, which will help Ambience develop a “purpose-built nursing roadmap,” executives said.
To ensure patient safety, Chart Chat responses are controlled by standard deployment assessments, real-time response quality monitoring, and continuous “nurse-involved” feedback. If the AI tool encounters “ambiguities or insufficient data,” the platform will explicitly notify nurses.
Tanha Kabir, head of product at Ambience Healthcare, told Fierce Healthcare that there are no similar AI tools “commercially available to nurses.”
“Most AI tools for nurses today focus on ambient documentation and were originally built for doctors,” Kabir says. “But the nurses and nursing partners on our team were very clear: Nurses are not suffering from a lack of information; they are drowning in information.”
A January 2022 study published in the National Library of Medicine found that nurses in the United States spend 25% to 41% of their time on documentation.
“We know that nurses can spend a significant portion of their time in the EHR,” Kabir said. “Reducing that burden has meaningful downstream effects in terms of more time at the bedside, better coordination of care, and ultimately safer patient care.”
Nurses using the tool say it “helps them develop a richer and more confident understanding” of their patients, Kabir said.
“They also consistently mention time savings, especially for complex long-stay patients where it would have taken a lot of effort to integrate a complete hospitalization history,” Kabir said, adding that it has been “particularly helpful” in preparing for handoffs, trending care, and quickly answering specific clinical questions.
“The overall feeling is that this is a tool that nurses really enjoy and want to use, which is rare in medical technology,” Kabir said.
Founded in 2020, Ambience has built a platform that uses AI for documentation, clinical document integrity, and point-of-care coding. AI documentation software records patient appointments, automates documentation by listening to ambient sounds, and prepares specialty-specific chart summaries. The company secured $243 million in Series C funding in July, making it one of the largest medical technology financings of last year.
The company continues to develop new AI tools and last fall released the ICD-10 Clinical Document Integrity Assistant for inpatient care. At the time, executives noted that the company saw a huge opportunity to use AI-assisted agents to support related medical and nursing staff.
