Integration Analyst

10 things every practice administrator should know about AI in medical practice. From ambient scribes to diagnostic decision support, artificial intelligence is reshaping how medicine gets done. (AI) is no longer a horizon issue for U.S. physicians. It's embedded in (EHR) platforms, prior authorization workflows and patient communication tools that practices use every day, often without much fanfare or formal training. For physicians trying to separate the useful from the overhyped, the landscape can feel overwhelming. These 10 points can help physicians navigate AI on their own terms. 1: you are probably already using AI, whether you know it or not. Most major EHR vendors, including Epic, Oracle Health and athenahealth, have integrated AI-powered features into their platforms in recent years, from predictive tools to automated prior authorization flagging. Before evaluating any new AI product, take stock of what your current systems already offer. Many practices have AI features sitting dormant that they have never activated. 2: ambient AI scribes are the technology with the most immediate ROI, but they're not all the same. Ambient documentation tools that listen to patient-physician conversations and automatically generate clinical notes have advanced faster than almost any other AI application in medicine. Products from companies including Microsoft-owned Nuance, Abridge, Ambience Healthcare and Suki vary significantly in how they handle specialty-specific language, EHR integration, turnaround time and pricing. Many vendors offer pilots or evaluation periods. Use them before committing. 3: read every note your AI scribe generates. Every one. Ambient scribes reduce documentation burden, but they don't eliminate physician responsibility for what ends up in the chart. Errors in AI-generated notes, such as misattributed symptoms, wrong medication doses or missed negations, carry the same legal and clinical weight as errors in notes you write yourself. Spot-checking is not enough. Develop a fast, consistent review habit before signing off. 4: understand how your malpractice carrier handles AI. Most major carriers have not excluded AI-related claims outright. The Doctors Company, for example, has stated publicly that it has no exclusion for AI and would defend and potentially indemnify physicians if AI played a role in a claim. That said, policy language across the industry is still evolving, and carriers are still working through how to assess AI-related risk and underwriting. Before deploying any AI tool in your practice, contact your insurer and confirm specifically how AI-related scenarios would be handled under your current coverage. 5: AI diagnostic support tools are aids, not diagnosticians. Tools that flag potential diagnoses, surface drug interactions or identify patients at risk for deterioration can add genuine value, but they are trained on data sets that may not reflect your patient population. Overreliance is a documented risk. These tools work best when physicians treat them as a second set of eyes, not a second opinion. 6: know who owns your patient data when you sign an AI vendor contract. Many AI tools learn and improve by training on deidentified patient data. Vendor contracts vary widely in how they define deidentification, who retains data rights and whether patient data can be used to train models that serve other health systems or clients. Have legal counsel review any AI vendor agreement before signing, with specific attention to data use and retention clauses. 7: patient attitudes toward AI are more complicated than they appear. Research suggests patient openness to AI in health care varies considerably by context and is not universally positive. A 2025 study published in JAMA Network Open found that patients actually portal message responses on quality measures but reported lower satisfaction once they knew AI was involved. Separately, a national found U.S. adults generally hold low expectations for benefits from AI in health care, with trust in their physician as a stronger driver of comfort than AI itself. What the research consistently supports is that transparency matters: Most patients want to know when AI is being used in their care and how. Make disclosure part of your practice workflow, not an afterthought. Take our survey: tell us how AI is changing your practice. We want to hear directly from physicians and practice administrators. Physicians Practice and Medical Economics are surveying readers on their experience with AI scribes and the broader question: Is AI making medicine better? Your responses will inform our ongoing coverage and may be featured in an upcoming report. The survey takes approximately five minutes to complete. Please take a moment to anonymously share your experience in the window below, or to answer. The story continues below. 8: front desk and billing AI can save you money before you ever see a patient. Prior authorization automation, insurance eligibility verification and claims scrubbing tools have some of the clearest, most measurable ROI in the AI landscape. If your practice has not evaluated this category, it is a lower-risk entry point than clinical AI and often pays for itself quickly. Several specialty-agnostic platforms now target independent and small-group practices specifically. 9: AI will not fix a broken workflow. It will make it faster. Practices seeing the most benefit from AI tools tend to be those that have already done the work of standardizing clinical and administrative workflows. AI layered onto a disorganized documentation process, a fragmented EHR setup or a poorly defined triage protocol tends to amplify existing problems rather than solve them. Before piloting any AI tool, map the workflow it is meant to improve. 10: the regulatory environment is still catching up, and physicians have a stake in shaping it. The Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and Congress are all actively developing frameworks for AI in health care, with new guidance and proposed rules appearing regularly. The has been pushing for national standards around transparency, bias mitigation and the appropriate apportionment of physician liability for AI errors. Staying informed on the regulatory landscape and engaging through your specialty society when comment periods open matters for the long-term trajectory of how AI gets used in medicine. Have thoughts on how AI is affecting your practice or medicine as a whole? on AI scribes and the future of medicine. Optimize your practice with the Physicians Practice newsletter, offering management pearls, leadership tips, and business strategies tailored for practice administrators and physicians of any specialty.

Here's what happened last time athena made a big move into a marketplace category. athena announced its own AI Voice and 2-Way Texting functionality (link to blog). That should light a fire under the marketplace partners offering those services. 25 of the 33 companies currently offering Voice AI on the marketplace joined in the last 3 years. They probably don't know that athena has done this before. The ones who learn from what happened last time will be better positioned for what's coming. The self check-in precedent. Patient online check-in solutions were the original hot girl at the dance on the athena marketplace. athena hadn't built self check-in functionality and Jonathan Bush was excited about the More Disruption Please program (precursor to the marketplace). The strategy was to let marketplace partners fill the gap. It worked. Phreesia went on to become a public company and Epion, their main competition, was acquired by Kyruus. Still, customers asked for native self check-in functionality and athena product teams saw a missing puzzle piece in their road map. So a few years later athena built a native self check-in feature. Practices were pumped. They thought they would be able to ditch their self check-in marketplace partner. But that didn't happen. Why not? athena's first version of self check-in didn't pull many clients away from the marketplace. It was challenging to set up and had feature gaps. Then in 2022 they released a rebuilt version that was easier to configure, but it ran into architectural constraints around forms. They've continued to iterate, but the gap persists. athena's APIs are robust enough that marketplace partners could continue appealing to customers through athena's releases. When the athena team improved social history handling, marketplace partners benefited from that work. Also, athena's internal teams face the same friction any product org does: internal politics, competing roadmaps, the forever balance of bugs vs. infrastructure vs. new features. Open APIs give marketplace partners a meaningful chance to compete. The real limiting factor for athena was their need to conform to existing standards and workflows across all of their products. Changing those standards would require cross-team collaboration and create downstream impacts across the platform. That constraint hit hardest around forms. And that's where the wedge opened up. The wedge. Self check-in has interesting parallels to Voice AI because it's also not a workflow that anyone at the practice does themselves. The practice experiences a good self check-in workflow downstream of the patient doing the check-in. The quality of the workflow is judged by how much work it removes from the staff. Say there is one type of document that a practice needs a patient to sign, let's say a custom consent for a medication, and it doesn't play nice with athena's self check-in workflows. For the patient, they do self check-in, fill out all the forms in the portal, then when they get to the practice, they sign one more form. Doesn't feel like a big deal. At their other doctors on Epic, they have to fill out a whole packet of forms every time they come in. For the practice, this is a huge pain. This one form that doesn't fit into the athena workflow means the front desk person has to print, get a signature, and scan it back into athena. The difference between doing that for 1 form and for 5 forms is negligible for the front desk, so having that one wet signature form prevented them from achieving their goal of a paperless check-in. That wedge opened up space for marketplace partners, not confined to the architecture restrictions of athena, to build form builders that can make any type of form a practice wants. More than a decade after Phreesia and Epion launched, for many practices, marketplace partners still offer better self check-in workflows than athena. Digital Check-in partners average roughly 100 athena practice connections each, nearly 2x the marketplace average. The top three alone serve over 2,300 practices. That adoption happened alongside athena's own bundled check-in workflows. This is not a failure by athena. They're playing an ecosystem game. Some practices will choose the built-in functionality and others will go to the marketplace. The 25 Voice AI vendors who joined the marketplace in the last 3 years should take notes. For athena, it's better to have a practice choosing between athena's AI voice and a marketplace partner's than to lose that practice to Elation. The marketplace exists because athena wants it to. Find the wedge, and make sure it's a valuable one.

Cedar partners with AthenaOne for improved patient financial experience. Up next. Published on 24 March 2026 Cedar aims to enhance financial interactions for healthcare providers within eight weeks. * Cedar collaborates with AthenaOne to enhance patient financial experiences. * Healthcare practices can see improvements within eight weeks. * The partnership aims to streamline financial interactions for better patient engagement. Cedar is partnering with AthenaOne to enhance the patient financial experience for healthcare providers. This collaboration aims to modernize financial interactions with patients, allowing practices to improve engagement and streamline operations. The initiative offers a significant opportunity for healthcare practices to generate better outcomes in their financial processes. Practices that implement Cedar's solutions alongside AthenaOne's platform can expect to see results in as little as eight weeks. By integrating these systems, healthcare providers will be better equipped to manage patient billing and payments, contributing to a more efficient financial experience. This partnership underscores a growing trend in the healthcare industry focused on optimizing patient interactions. The ability to modernize financial processes is critical as healthcare providers strive to improve patient satisfaction. Cedar's technology seeks to address common pain points in the financial aspects of patient care. These advancements not only benefit healthcare practices but also enhance the overall experience for patients navigating financial responsibilities. You may also like. Services PMI at 53.8 in january 2026, according to ISM report. January sees strong growth in services sector as PMI remains robust. Services... * February 4, 2026 Pharmacelera raises $6M to expand in US and enhance drug discovery platform. Funding will support growth and technological advancements in drug discovery. Pharmacelera has... * February 18, 2026 BD helps scientists advance immunology and cancer research with ai-powered insights and automation. Innovative automation enhances cancer research and immunological studies. AI-powered tools improve research... NUNM receives $1.5 million gift to support campus expansion and future integrative medicine center. Major donation aims to enhance educational opportunities at NUNM. NUNM receives a... * February 28, 2026