Most health system leaders have run an AI pilot. Far fewer can show their finance team the value that investment is producing.
Brentwood, Tenn.-based Ardent Health can. In about a year, the system, which operates 30 hospitals and 285 sites of care, took ambient documentation from 100 pilot providers to an enterprise standard. Along the way, its executive leadership, financial planning and analysis team and clinical operators aligned on a single ROI estimate: Ambience generates a validated 3X ROI in annual bottom-line benefit per participating provider.
Ardent focused on three metrics, each with a clean pre-deployment baseline: evaluation and management coding, encounter volume and hierarchical condition category capture.
This whitepaper is drawn from a featured session at Becker’s 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference. In conversation with Mike Valli, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Value Officer at Ambience Healthcare, Sean Smith, VP, Connected Care & Digital Health, Ardent Health, shares how his team built the model and kept adoption high as the program grew.
Learnings include:
- How Ardent narrowed its ROI case to three attributable metrics, and why leaving other KPIs out made the case stronger
- How utilization reached 90% in the pilot and held at 87% enterprise-wide, regardless of specialty
- The time providers got back: documentation time down more than 40% and after-hours “pajama time” down 57%
- Why the back half of the adoption curve took one-on-one conversations, physician champions and field support
- Why every new Ardent provider now receives an Ambience license on day one