Artificial Intelligence
The market for AI medical scribes
Ambient AI medical scribes are about the easiest — and hottest — way into to health care for AI-based startups. Just take a look at this graphic that lists 35 companies who are (or at one point were) trying to use ambient voice for translating the audio of doctors' visits into written notes. The area is both well within the text capabilities of AI tools and also doesn't directly affect patient care — though academics doubt that industry claim — thus making the area unlikely to be burdened by regulations anytime soon (more on that later in this newsletter).
Today Tenet Healthcare, the second-largest for-profit health system in the U.S., announced that it is rolling out Commure's AI scribe to all of its employed physicians. If Commure doesn't quite sound familiar to you, you might instead recognize the name Augmedix. Commure acquired longtime ambient medical scribe company Augmedix in October.
The acquisition means that Augmedix's scribe can now be marketed within a larger portfolio of solutions — Commure also has revenue cycle management, remote patient monitoring, and staff duress products. In fact, Commure CEO Tanay Tandon said the company is giving away its scribe service for free to anyone who uses its RCM solution.
The ambient scribe space reminds Tandon of the electric scooter space from five or six years ago, he said.
"There were like 18 electric scooter companies and VCs were just pouring money into them and all of them died with the exception of two, which was Uber and Lyft," he said. "If you just offer the electric scooter, you will die because the margin structure long term and the power of bundling is just going to outweigh everything else."
The trend of packaging scribes with other services was evident in other new additions to the STAT Generative AI Tracker.
Check out the latest additions to the tracker here, and read my story on the AI scribe market, including how Abridge CEO Shiv Rao and Suki CEO Punit Soni see the crowded marketplace evolving.
Regulation
The FDA is meeting to discuss regulating generative AI
The Food and Drug Administration's digital health advisory committee is meeting for the first time tomorrow and Thursday. The goal of the meeting is to discuss whether and how the FDA should regulate the use of generative AI by U.S. health care providers.
Though many of the comments ahead of the meeting asked the FDA to regulate ambient scribes like the ones we described above — and the FDA did seem to admit that there could be patient safety risks if such AI scribes hallucinated — it seems that these platforms could fall into a regulatory crack in FDA's system.
For more on what to watch during the meeting, STAT's Katie Palmer and Casey Ross summed up the long documents the FDA released ahead of the convening. Read more in STAT+ for why it's so hard to regulate AI products in medicine before and after they reach patients, especially within the confines of the FDA's purview.
If you hear anything during the meeting that catches your attention, ping me: brittany.trang@statnews.com
Telehealth
Telehealth prescribing abilities extended for one year
On Friday, some great news rolled in for telehealth providers that prescribe opioid addiction or ADHD medications: Federal officials are renewing rules that allow providers to prescribe controlled substances like buprenorphine and Adderall without first meeting a patient in person. Those rules were set to expire on Jan. 1, but have now been extended until the end of 2025.
The Drug Enforcement Agency was supposed to issue a final rule this fall that would have created permanent rules for this, and the uncertainty over the future of controlled substances online prescribing cast a pall over telehealth companies. A former official attributed this failure to inter-agency conflicts and politics.
The extension kicks the resolution of a years-long debate — one that has already elicited nearly 40,000 comments on earlier proposed rules — to the second Trump administration and agency leadership that is yet to be determined. Read more on the decision and its implications from STAT's Katie Palmer and Mario Aguilar.
No comments