Elation Health Stresses Value of AI Features Built Natively Into EHR 

Provider organizations of all sizes are starting to deploy AI solutions as add-ons to their EHR. But one EHR vendor focused on primary care, San Francisco-based Elation Health, is stressing the importance of AI features built natively into the EHR platform. 

Kyna Fong, Ph.D., Elation Health’s co-founder and CEO, says that historically it has been a challenge for incumbent EHR vendors to innovate on their platforms. Building new expertise and skill sets within your organization, and iterating and rapidly releasing innovations to customers hasn’t been a strength of legacy EHR vendors traditionally, says Fong, who co-founded Elation Health in 2010. She is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy at UC Berkeley and UCSF. Fong hold an M.S. in computer science from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

“We are embedding AI natively into Elation as one of the tools in the toolkit for accelerating our roadmap and solving important problems for our customers faster or more completely,” she said. 

Most EHR vendors and many providers view AI as an add-on, she explained, and maybe it's integrated, maybe it's not. “But there are challenges with that. One is the workflow experience. Those are inherently constrained by, the integrations you can build, the connection points, what data they exchange, the structure of it,” she said. “Whereas when you build natively, the workflows are seamless. They're built first order into the platform. And in addition, we can create advanced capabilities by being a built-in solution. We've had our ambient scribe for a while, and we've shown how when you are natively built into the EHR, it opens up new capabilities that an add-on cannot.”

From the provider perspective, there are issues of cost and complexity, she said. “If you are buying a third-party AI point solution for each AI need that you have, that starts to get really complex to manage the experience, in addition to cost,” Fong said. “They’re just going to pile up if you take that approach.”

Fong described some of the new features Elation is adding. “We’ve complemented our scribe with a task automation feature. Throughout the visit, we're identifying action items that need to be taken, like care referral to the cardiologist or a lab to be done, or a prescription refill, or a new prescription, and those get teed up, and we make it one click to get those actions done.”

A feature called Clinical Insights pulls data from other parts of the patient's chart to summarize before an encounter or answer questions concisely about what is in the chart. “It can pull together a meaningful summary that enables the physician to enter a visit with all of the relevant information,” Fong explained. “When we talk to physicians, especially primary care physicians who have complicated patients, they can spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the chart reading, digging through all the labs, the consult letters and figuring out what are the key things that they need to know."

Another feature called Wordsmith uses generative AI to help providers draft post-visit communications, including referrals, provider letters, and patient letters. It has customization options, allowing users to set preferences for tone, style, and structure in their communications.

Fong said the fact that smaller primary care practice customers don’t have big IT staffs to help with implementations puts the onus on Elation to make its tools intuitive and easy to use. “First and foremost is just intuitive design, right? Clinical first, ease of use,” she said. “And that's something that's always been core to our product philosophy and our approach.”