Nearly every major health system has adopted, or is adopting, ambient AI for clinical documentation––a rate of uptake more reminiscent of viral consumer apps like TikTok than of traditional healthcare technologies.
To learn more about the value and hype around ambient AI and agentic AI, and what leaders should look for in technologies and partners, Becker’s Healthcare spoke with Tanay Tandon, CEO of Commure.
Four key takeaways were:
- Ambient AI has achieved consumer-app-like adoption in healthcare. In Mr. Tandon’s view, before and during 2023, only early adopting health systems used ambient AI. In 2024, which felt like “the year of ambient,” he saw mass proliferation. 2025 has seen skeptical health systems adopting it with their EMRs enabling deeper integrations or in some cases developing their own ambient AI scribe solutions. This third phase is ripe for the opportunity to create value for health systems beyond “vanilla scribing.”
Commure has experienced this growth first hand with its Ambient AI solution, from doing hundreds of thousands of appointments a year in ‘23 to annualizing over 20 million appointments this year, shared Mr. Tandon.
- Integration, not just scribing, drives greater adoption and value. In 2023 and 2024, most health systems focused primarily on ambient scribing, with deployments reaching an estimated 10–20% of providers, according to Mr. Tandon.
“Most health systems that signed ambient scribing contracts a year or two ago have abysmally low provider adoption because it’s not part of an operating system or set of tools that connect every point solution into a single platform,” Mr. Tandon said.
In contrast, at health systems where Commure enabled automation and ambient AI in multiple areas––intake, chart summarization, patient engagement and the revenue cycle––provider adoption is up to 70-80%. That is, in part, also to the fact that Commure extends well beyond the note through autonomous coding and care cues.
- Agentic AI can help aid healthcare’s labor crisis by turning copilots into autopilots. The concept of agents isn’t new. What is new is large language models (LLMs) that are intelligent enough to process large chains of information and turn that information into complex chains of action. For example, agentic AI can handle prior authorizations and claims appeals.
Commure is using agentic AI to assist its denials team. Since deploying agentic LLMs, the amount of dollars flowing through the company’s RCM engine has increased nearly five-fold, while staffing has remained flat.
Due to perpetuating labor shortages and rising labor costs, health systems will need to leverage agentic AI to realize similar efficiency gains and handle tasks previously done by people. “The only solution to serve their customers . . . is to deploy agentic LLMs that can handle actions themselves,” Mr. Tandon said. “These agents shift from being copilots alongside physicians to being back-office autopilots that run lights out.”
- The best partners combine engineering talent and onsite collaboration. AI vendors and solutions are flooding the market, making it hard to distinguish between “shiny objects” and technologies that deliver lasting value.
“Run a lot of pilots with a lot of different vendors to figure out what is the best solution, what delivers ROI, who’s real and who’s not, what solutions are integrated and what’s a real platform,” Mr. Tandon advised.
He also suggested looking at a potential partner’s depth of engineering talent and asking whether the company will deploy its engineers on site. In his experience, the best outcomes are achieved when engineers are “forward deployed” on site to work hand in hand with front-line staff in co-creating customized real-world solutions.
“There’s no such thing as cookie cutter, enterprise software, and healthcare, and you have to modify and customize on the ground to the workflows of the health system. If your partner isn’t sending engineers onsite to do hand-to-hand combat and work on the front lines with your staff, that’s a bad partner in today’s day and age. It’s a good signal when you have engineering talent that is customizing for your needs every minute of the day.”
