Orchid, a behavioral health electronic health records provider, has developed the first scribe tool that uses artificial intelligence to assist overwhelmed mental health providers and help patients get care faster.
With the help of an automated clinical note system, mental and behavioral health providers who have tested it have been able to save hours of documentation and see more patients — or have more time to de-stress and reduce burnout, says Joseph Pomianowski, founder and CEO of Orchid.
WHY IT MATTERS
Most mental health professionals — at least 70% of them in solo practice — need to spend nearly a day a week on administrative tasks, which limits their ability to see patients, according to Wilmington, Delaware-based Orchid.
The company is announcing a HIPAA-compliant AI-powered clinical note-taking solution on Monday to help them tackle the burden. Orchid AI integrates with its own EHR and with any other EHR via a Chrome extension, the company said.
“Orchid ensures HIPAA compliance by implementing robust security measures, including encryption standards such as AES-256 – both in transit and at rest – and strict access controls, along with comprehensive policies, incident response plans and regular employee training to protect patient information,” said Pomianowski. Healthcare IT News on Friday.
Orchid is HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliant, he said, but the company has also added safeguards to prevent data leaks, training the AI “on a clinician-by-clinician basis.”
Orchid AI also provides clinicians with templates to request recording consent or they can use their own and encourages them to delete encrypted session recordings once they are done taking notes.
Mental health records are stored encrypted in transit and at rest in the Amazon Web Services cloud.
“They have full control over the data when it comes to deletion, and we always encourage them to delete data sooner rather than later,” said Pomianowski, a lawyer and mathematician who previously worked with AI data analytics company Palantir Technologies. “We are constantly conducting risk assessments and updating our protocols to maintain the highest standards of data privacy and security.”
Orchid was founded in 2022 by Pomianowski – who said he was shocked during the pandemic to learn that many people were unable to access the vital mental health resources they needed because “clinicians themselves were overwhelmed with administrative work”.
Many independent clinicians spend up to 25% of their time on administrative work, and that understanding has helped him help clinicians reduce paperwork burdens and see more patients.
“During the clinical examination, clinicians need to balance the need to take accurate notes with the need to fully concentrate when talking to the patient,” he said.
Additionally, many insurance plans require providers to comply with documentation requirements to pay for services, and many providers choose to opt out of insurance or participate in multiple insurance plans – leading to more barriers to care.
Legacy behavioral health EHR technology is often incompatible with newer technologies like AI, but Pomianowski said “the addition of our AI-enabled clinical note solution is a significant advancement and advantage for clinicians.”
Clinicians can use the new AI scribe within the Orchid EHR, as a standalone tool, or on any EHR via a Chrome extension by recording patient sessions with patient permission. If the patient declines to record, the AI scribe can be used by dictating the notes and the AI will summarize their clinical notes for review.
With the clinician’s permission, Orchid’s AI can train itself in the clinician’s style and use previous clinical notes to draft new notes to ensure continuity of care, the company said.
It can also summarize patient histories, suggest billing and diagnosis codes, and provide post-visit summaries to increase patient retention. For admissions, it can pull information from forms.
“Customers report that because Orchid AI can now draft clinical notes for them, the time it takes to write clinical notes can be reduced from 20 minutes to just seconds per session,” said Ada Peng, spatial data analyst at Orchid and architect of Orchid AI.
“The addition of Orchid AI has been fantastic,” said Dr. David Halpern, a licensed psychiatrist in Pennsylvania and an Orchid EHR user, in a statement from the company. “I now spend much less time taking notes than I did before.”
THE BIGGER TREND
Behavioral health providers have struggled with digital transformation. They were not initially included in the EHR Incentive Program, which was designed to promote EHR adoption through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Meaningful Use Program.
There is also a shortage of mental health clinicians, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Wait times for care in some areas can be months or even years.
“Our goal is to remove barriers to accessing mental health care,” Pomianowski said.
AI-powered transcription tools have helped more patients and less burnout for primary care physicians and other providers, taking up more time after dinner and on weekends to complete charts that contribute to the terrible levels of burnout the healthcare industry faces.
“Providers no longer have to spend hours documenting,” Dr. Kendell Cannon, medical director at Herself Health, said last year after her primary care practice tested several available AI documentation tools and chose one that could work on the EHR as an extension.
In 2023, Whende Carroll, clinical informatics consultant at HIMSS, the parent company of Healthcare IT Newssays developers are increasingly turning to natural language processing to address vendor documentation burdens.
Later that year, lawmakers proposed that federal agencies develop voluntary standards for EHR mental health records and promote their adoption and interoperability, although no action has been taken to date.
ON PROFILE
“The whole idea is to help [mental health clinicians] “Reduce administrative workload and administrative burden, so they can spend more time with patients or watch more Netflix to reduce burnout,” Pomianowski said of the new AI scribe.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
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