University Hospital at Downstate is piloting an ambient artificial intelligence (AI) scribe with 50 physicians across family medicine, internal medicine, cardiology and the emergency department. The tool has drafted notes for more than 900 patient encounters since May, Altera Digital Health said on Tuesday (Sept. 22). The Brooklyn academic medical center is the first to use Sunrise Thread AI, which listens to the conversation and generates a structured clinical note inside the Sunrise electronic health record (EHR).

The physician reviews and approves the note before it enters the official record. From there, it feeds continued care, coding and billing. The work of reconstructing the visit afterward largely goes away.

Altera built Thread AI as a native part of its EHR rather than a bolt-on. The tool captures and interprets encounters from a desktop or phone. During the pilot, Downstate is tracking usability, transcription quality and the effect on documentation workflows, and Altera is building custom templates for its inpatient and emergency department physicians.

Dilip Nath, chief information officer at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, said the hospital found the tool “more robust than others while offering greater ease of use.” Demand from clinical staff remains high, he said.

Downstate serves about three million Brooklyn residents with more than 800 physicians across 53 specialties. Its rollout is small so far, but the workflow it tests is the one the rest of the industry is moving toward.

PYMNTS reported in February that clinicians at the University of Chicago Medicine cut documentation time and burnout with ambient AI, and that Sharp HealthCare and MaineHealth saw less after-hours charting.

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