The US healthcare system is in a cost crisis—healthcare costs now represent 17.3% of GDP. There is enormous pressure on healthcare organizations to fix our highly inefficient system, but that pressure to ‘do more’ has led to unprecedented levels of clinician and medical staff burnout and turnover, further exacerbating the crisis.
We’ve witnessed this firsthand. Our loved ones in the healthcare industry spend countless hours through nights and weekends on documentation, manual data entry, and other mounting administrative tasks. It’s the norm. On average, clinicians spend less than 50% of their time on direct patient care. Not only does this lead to burnout, the effects roll downstream, negatively impacting patient experience, care coordination, revenue cycle management, and every other aspect of the healthcare system.
When we met Mike and Nikhil in 2020 and co-led their seed round, we were struck by their approach to tackling a problem that hit so close to home. While there have been previous attempts at automating clinician documentation, they at best were limited point solutions that supplemented human scribes with rudimentary natural language processing, or required physicians to dictate their notes verbatim.
Mike and Nikhil had a bigger vision—a comprehensive platform that breaks down silos within the organization and supports clinicians with a single, continuously learning AI platform. We were excited to invest then, and since then, the team has successfully built and deployed the very first fully autonomous AI scribe with some of the leading healthcare institutions in the US. Ambience AutoScribe sits in the background and ambiently listens into the visit, completely automating the documentation process on behalf of clinicians. Users are awestruck not only by the accuracy of the system, but also by how the technology has evolved into a true clinician co-pilot: a partner that can deeply understand the clinical context of each patient, produce tailored patient education materials, and support accurate coding at the point of care. Practicing with Ambience means that each clinician gets to have their organization’s collective expertise at their side, for every single one of their visits.
The complexity of building what Ambience has created cannot be understated. Developing and maintaining this continuously learning AI platform is extremely difficult. It must deeply understand the medicine of every clinical specialty and subspecialty, endlessly chase perfection through real world use, and stay current on the latest guidelines and coding & billing rules. It must be reliable enough to use in high pressure clinical settings, and safe enough to trust with the most complex patients. But we know that Mike and Nikhil and team Ambience are up to the challenge in pursuit of a world-changing opportunity: to build the intelligence utility powering all medical care.
We’re thrilled to double down on being part of Ambience’s journey and lead their Series B.
ー Mamoon & Annie