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| Epic’s User Group Meeting, or UGM, kicks off on Monday. For the past few weeks leading up to the conference, there’s been a buzz of rumor and reporting about the electronic health record giant releasing its own AI scribe. |
| It’d be a major development for one of the hottest parts of health tech right now. AI scribe startups have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, and to us, it’s been one of the clearest instances in which AI is starting to impact the business of healthcare. |
| Epic, joining other EHRs in directly offering AI notetaking tools, makes the stakes even higher for startups like Abridge, Ambience, Suki and Nabla, which are focused on ambient documentation. What sets Epic apart, however, is its dominance within health systems, giving it the potential to tap into an already broad user base. |
| Should the scribe startups be worried? They’re not showing it. When we caught up with him Wednesday, Suki CEO Punit Soni emphasized that his company offers so much more than an AI scribe. It’s a platform that powers other healthcare companies and an AI assistant for documentation, coding support, and patient summaries across different EHRs in different clinical settings. It’s that comprehensiveness that his customers want, he said. |
| As a platform, “any one move within the market for a particular feature does not really change anything,” Soni said. He added, “The people who buy us, even in the Epic ecosystem, are people who actually want more than a button within the Epic Haiku app that can do ambient documentation.” (Haiku is Epic’s mobile app.) |
| Yes, but what happens if Epic and other EHRs go beyond AI scribes into some of these other features, like coding? Soni seemed skeptical they could do it well. When the mobile era came, companies had to build a mobile-first interface, rather than take an existing website and throw it on a phone, he said. AI requires a similar rework from end-to-end. |
| “It's not just enough to shove it into an existing setup,” he said. “So there is going to be a lot of work to be done to actually do that properly.” |
| - Shelby and Lydia |
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