Making Patient-Reported Outcomes Standard in Oncology Care: How Technology Can Lead the Way

RCM decision-makers report a 90% usage rate of AI (versus 63% of IT decision-makers) and are also much more likely to see value in using AI in RCM (86% vs 52% of IT and 44% of executive/financial leaders). Despite these numbers, RCM leaders are rarely involved in steering technology choices from day one.

If enterprise health systems truly want to harness the full power of ambient AI, revenue cycle leaders must drive the conversation or risk rising coding errors, ballooning denials, and lost revenue.

Commure’s Chief Strategy Officer, Ian Shakil, joined a panel of ambient speech technology leaders at the 2024 Revenue Cycle Summit to discuss this critical aspect of ambient AI adoption.

Why RCM Leaders Must Be at the Forefront of Ambient AI Adoption

Revenue cycle leaders stand at the intersection of patient care and financial viability, yet too often they’re left out of early conversations about ambient AI solutions. When these tools are selected purely to reduce clinician “pajama time,” crucial requirements for coding, compliance, and reimbursement may be overlooked. Inadequate or imprecise documentation means additional work on the back end for RCM teams, higher rates of denials, and missed revenue opportunities.

By having RCM leaders participate in solution vetting from the outset, health systems can ensure that coding awareness, denial prevention, and payer criteria are woven into the product’s workflow. Clinicians can then focus on accurate documentation with the help of subtle nudges from ambient AI at the point of care, and allow revenue cycle teams to focus on optimizing reimbursement rather than retroactively fixing issues. This proactive collaboration ultimately positions RCM leaders as strategic partners who help unlock the full value of ambient AI technology.

Key Criteria for Evaluating Ambient AI Solutions

Selecting an ambient AI platform isn’t just about automating note-taking; it’s about building a foundation that supports efficient clinical documentation and robust revenue cycle outcomes. Here are three non-negotiable factors RCM leaders should demand from any potential vendor:

Intelligence & Contextual Awareness

A truly “intelligent” system goes beyond transcribing conversation. It should ingest past patient history, relevant diagnoses, and contextual cues in real time, ensuring each note is precise and complete. By nudging clinicians to document specific details—like HCC codes or modifiers—combining ambient AI with RCM preempts downstream queries and boosts coding accuracy.

Metrics & ROI

Time savings for clinicians may spark initial excitement, but RCM leaders need solid evidence of financial gains. Evaluate solutions by how they impact CDI query rates, decrease denials, and increase average reimbursement per visit. The more granular these metrics, the easier it is to pinpoint exactly where the AI is driving revenue capture and where adjustments may be needed.

Scalability & Flexibility

From multiple specialties to multiple languages, modern health systems are complex. A solution must adapt to varied care settings and be versatile enough to accommodate hospital inpatient needs, outpatient clinics, and everything in between. When growing or shifting payment models health systems require a platform that can scale rather than a rigid point solution that only works for a single slice of operations.

Measuring Success and Tracking ROI

Ambient AI solutions can transform clinician workflows—but without clear metrics, it’s tough to pinpoint precisely how much value they add. Here are three key areas to focus on and ensure all stakeholders are bought into before moving forward with a solution:

Clinical & Financial Data

Time savings, while important for reducing burnout, must be linked to clear revenue cycle improvements. Some health systems track metrics like average additional reimbursement per visit, while others focus on the uptick in the number of patients scheduled per week. Tying productivity gains to financial outcomes—rather than just survey data—is crucial for securing ongoing support and expansion of ambient AI initiatives.

Service Line–Specific Measurements

Every specialty has different coding, documentation, and quality requirements. In primary care, it may be about capturing HCC codes and add-on services. In the ED, a major focus could be critical care capture. Meanwhile, value-based care programs hinge on proper HCC re-capture and closing care gaps. RCM leaders should expect vendors to offer specialized metrics that reflect each department’s unique workflows and financial goals.

Clinician Burnout & Patient Experience

Ambient AI’s impact goes well beyond any single encounter. One of the largest contributors to clinician burnout is excessive documentation. By easing the after-hours charting burden, ambient AI enables providers to stay focused on patient care rather than note-taking. At the same time, patients benefit from more engaged face-to-face interactions. Tracking improvements in staff satisfaction, lower turnover rates, and positive patient feedback confirms that the technology not only boosts revenue capture but also enhances the overall care experience.

Looking Ahead: The Future of RCM in a Post-AI World

Ambient AI has moved beyond simple note-taking. The next phase of innovation will blend documentation, coding, and even payer interactions into seamless workflows, making RCM activities more automated and less burdensome. Over time, health systems may see real-time prior authorizations, near-instant claim adjudication, and more accurate risk adjustment—all fueled by increasingly “invisible” yet powerful AI-driven assistance. Rather than merely amplifying the status quo, leaders must challenge their technology vendors to reimagine care delivery and reimbursement in a way that unlocks new levels of efficiency and precision.

For revenue cycle leaders, this future points to a strategic pivot. Ambient AI solutions that were initially championed for clinician well-being are now demonstrating measurable business impact, with the potential to reshape how financial risk is managed. Yet these tools will only fulfill their promise if RCM teams drive the conversation, insist on measurable ROI, and ensure that solution providers are fully aligned with both clinical and financial objectives.

Discover the future of healthcare, powered by Commure. Trusted by some of the largest health systems including Tenet, Adventist, and Sutter Health, the Commure platform not only has deeply integrated RCM and ambient AI solutions, but a whole host of other products including staff duress, patient engagement, and RPM. Speak with one of our product experts today to learn more.
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Discover the Future of Healthcare

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Commure Agents — intelligent, customizable assistants that automate complex tasks, dramatically simplifying patient experiences, clinician workflows, and administrative overhead. Agents can automate voice calls with patients, run manual tasks in electronic medical records (EMRs) automatically, analyze a dataset, generate documents and more!

Commure Agents will redefine how hospitals operate—eliminating inefficiencies, reducing provider burnout, and delivering high-quality patient care.

What are Commure Agents?

Commure Agents are powerful LLM systems designed to streamline experiences for healthcare administrators, clinicians and patients. Think of them as a virtual colleague who can handle routine documentation, retrieve and summarize patient data, draft patient notes, and even conduct preliminary analyses. It’s always learning, always available, and constantly improving to support you throughout your day.

Powered by advanced natural language processing (NLP) and integrated with leading Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, Commure Agents are ready to seamlessly fit into your existing clinical environment and across every department.

Scheduling — Listen to Sophia help a patient schedule their appointment:

Clinical — Listen to Maria help prepare a patient for their upcoming colonoscopy:

Billing — Listen to Julia explain a copay to a patient and take payment over the phone:

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Commure Agents Use Cases

Commure Agents offer dozens of integration use cases out-of-the-box. Additionally, through our “forward deployed engineering” program, which embeds our engineers on-site with your team to develop solutions collaboratively, the number of use cases made available with Commure Agents is limitless.

Agents span the entire hospital across administrative, clinical, financial, and operational areas to cover a wide variety of high-value use cases for healthcare systems. Here is look at a few use cases in-depth:

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Patient Navigation

• AI Call Center Agent: Handles patient and insurance company calls autonomously, completing tasks like appointment confirmations, billing inquiries, and pre-authorizations.
• Scheduling Agent (Commure Sherpa): Manages patient appointment scheduling, resolves conflicts, and optimizes calendars for providers.
• Patient Outreach Agent: Sends reminders, educational materials, and real-time updates to patients about appointments, medications, or lab results

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Care Management

• Referral Management Agent: Tracks and processes patient referrals, automating follow-ups with external providers or specialists.
• Prior Authorization Agent: Automates prior authorization requests for procedures, medications, or tests by interacting with payers.
• Discharge Planning Agent: Generates personalized discharge instructions and coordinates follow-up workflows for patients.

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Revenue Cycle Management

• Revenue Cycle Optimization Agent: Identifies inefficiencies in the revenue cycle and suggests improvements for better financial outcomes.
• Claims Processing Agent: Submits, tracks, and reconciles insurance claims, ensuring faster reimbursements.
• Denials Autopilot Agent: Identifies rejected claims, finds errors, and resubmits claims to reduce denial rates and boost revenue.

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Benefits of Commure Agents

• Purpose-Built for Healthcare: Commure Agents are specifically designed and trained for the complexities of medical practice. It “understands” medical jargon, workflows, and compliance requirements.
• Easy Integration: Commure Agents integrate into your existing EHR and software ecosystem, allowing you to access its capabilities right from the systems you already use every day.
• Real-Time Assistance: Whether you need a patient’s medication history, a quick consult on relevant guidelines, or a concise summary of complex data, Commure Agents deliver it instantly—no waiting, no back-and-forth.
• Secure & Compliant: Healthcare data security and patient privacy come first. Commure Agents are built with strict adherence to HIPAA and other regulatory frameworks, ensuring your data remains secure.

Get Started with Forward Deployed Engineering

‍We can’t wait for you to see how Commure Agents transform the way you work.If you’re an existing customer and you’d like to get started with Commure Agents, reach out to your customer success manager. They can help you engage our forward deployed engineering team to collaborate on addressing your Agent needs. If you’re not yet a customer, but you’re interested in learning more. Fill out the following form and someone from Commure will reach out to you in order to understand your needs.

Welcome to Commure Up Close! In this employee spotlight series, we sit down with team members from across Commure to learn about their backgrounds, their perspectives on our company culture, and their lives beyond work. Through these stories, we aim to provide a deeper look into why talented individuals choose Commure and how we work together to transform and simplify healthcare with cutting-edge technologies.

In this issue, we are excited to highlight Commure's Senior Vice President and General Manager, Dan Warner, who has been with Commure since July of 2024.
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Tell us a little bit about yourself, what do you like to do outside of work?
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Being a husband and father of two, my life is wonderfully full. My family has a joint love for sports, and my son is currently learning how to ice skate on the frozen ponds of the Midwest. I also enjoy watching basketball and doing the stuff that you do as a dad!
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As a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?
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It changed about every two weeks. First, I wanted to be a Power Ranger. Then I wanted to go to space. Followed by being a nurse (my mother is a retired nurse), and working in a church (my father served in a community). As I grew older, I started to enjoy IT and eventually found my way into tech. I stumbled into a little known company (at the time) called Uber, and have been hooked on tech ever since.
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Describe a day in the life of your role.
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I have two roles at the company. The first is my General Manager role leading Strongline, and the Patient Experience businesses, and the other is overseeing marketing. My roles take me in many different directions, but on most days I find myself speaking to prospects or customers, getting involved on high-impact initiatives, and providing our teams with the necessary resources to grow the business. I also spend a decent amount of time recruiting great talent.

What made you decide to join Commure?
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I left my prior role running Operations at the leading SaaS company for daycares to introspect and be intentional about what I wanted the next chapter of my career to be. It happened to be that Pat Winter (who goes way back with me to our time at Uber) texted me every month with "Hey, What are you doing? We’re doing fun stuff at Commure". I eventually took the call and quickly learned that Commure ticked two important boxes:

One, I immediately got behind the mission of improving and simplifying healthcare for all its constituents. We make a difference. Just by how much came to life for me shortly after starting. During a conference a caregiver came by to give me a hug because of thankful she was for Strongline helping her during a serious incident (the day prior). 

The second piece is that the team is built to build. When you enter our Mountain View office you immediately get this overwhelming sense of “stuff is happening”. The energy is infectious, especially at the time of advanced AI giving companies like us endless new ways of operating.
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How would you describe the Commure company culture?
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When I think back to my time at Uber, what made it successful was the relentless belief in the mission across every single person in the company, and letting customers drive the product roadmap, as opposed to the other way around. 

At Commure, we are united in our enthusiasm to take on the unbelievably grand mission of simplifying health care, especially when many say it cannot be done. You can ask any person here: It can be done, it will not be easy, but we love everything about it.

As it relates to customers, we run an important activity called Forward Deployed Engineering. Instead of showing up to a call with a defined set of product offerings, we invite customers to tell us about the problems they have. We then go there, co-develop on the spot, and only leave once we have established a working prototype. That is very unique. Both permeate throughout our culture and make me want to get out of bed every day.
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What has been your biggest accomplishment at Commure so far?
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When I look at our staff duress & smart sensor business, Strongline, it has gone through a lot of positive change. At the end of 2023, we released our next-generation duress and RTLS platform that serves over a quarter of a million caregivers daily. In 2024, we worked with all our customers to upgrade them. The team has done an incredible job working side-by-side with our customers to get it done.
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What advice would you give someone on their first day at Commure?
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You are here because of your capabilities; embrace it. We are not a place that requires permission for action. We don’t value work theatrics. The degree of freedom may be daunting or counterintuitive to where you spent your prior career, but it is freeing to know that you can make a decision, and then go make it right.
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Interested in a career building the next generation of healthcare technology powered by AI? We are always looking for talented people across our departments.
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Explore Career Opportunities

Oncologists face unprecedented challenges today, with a record-breaking 2,000,000 new cases in the U.S. in 2024 alone. Beyond the complexity of cancer care, oncologists navigate a mountain of documentation that demands precision and time. Meanwhile, oncologists must juggle these burdens while attempting to focus on attentive communications and compassion at the point of care.  

Providers using Commure’s Ambient AI suite at leading cancer institutions like The US Oncology Network, American Oncology Network, City of Hope, and dozens of multi-specialty IDNs such as TriHealth have seen tangible results in improving their oncology workflows. More than 80% of oncology users report that Commure Ambient AI helps them better focus on their patients.

That’s why Commure Ambient AI exists: reducing clinical documentation time by 80% on average, so physicians can gain meaningful time back.

“I love that I can give more focus to observing and truly caring for my cancer patients. Not having to input all of my notes myself saves me time, making me more accessible and allowing me to treat a few more patients each day.” - Alexander I. Spira, MD, medical oncologist with US Oncology

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Commure Ambient AI: Intelligent, Human-Centric Workflows for Oncology

In a crowded AI marketplace, oncologists require a deep level of specialization and flexibility. With over a decade of experience working alongside oncology professionals, Commure’s solutions are rooted in proven experience with the unique needs of cancer care, offering:

1. Onco-Optimized AI: From interval history to chart preparation for complex visits, our solutions generate highly accurate and detailed notes tailored to your workflows.
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2. Care Cues for Clinical Decision Support: Deep two-way EHR integrations (including Epic, Cerner, Meditech, and iKnowMed, and many others), enable intelligent nudges to aid in medical decision making (MDM) and tending to gaps in care.
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3. Broadest Spectrum of Offerings: Whether you need AI-powered fully-automated documentation (Commure Ambient AI), hybrid AI solutions (Commure Ambient Assist), or full service options with remote human-in-the-loop support (Commure Ambient Live), we meet you where you are with our suite of solutions. 
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4. Proven Success Across Enterprises: Increased work relative value units (wRVUs), reduced charting time, and more productive schedules.
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5. Platform Options: Commure offers the ability to trigger patient engagement, care pathways from ambient conversation; further, Commure offers highly automated RCM solutions with closed loop RCM-metrics tied to Ambient AI; these modules can be packaged in a single integration and support model. 

‍AI’s Role in the Fight Against Cancer ‍

The American Cancer Society projects that global cancer cases in men and women will increase by 84% and 68.5%, respectively, by 2050. These numbers are staggering, and yet oncologists face an already overwhelming workload.

A JNCI Cancer Spectrum study found oncologists have a high EHR burden, and receive more result notifications and messages a day than physicians in other specialties. Oncologists often spend hours a day on average combing through patient records to prepare for encounters. Social and family histories, interval histories, staging details, and treatment responses require a rigorous level of depth and accuracy. 

Unchecked, this volume of administrative work has deteriorated job satisfaction and work-life balance for oncologists. Today, 59% of oncologists report one or more symptoms of burnout, compared to 34% in 2013, according to ASCO. Meanwhile, 63% of oncologists say advising patients is the number one factor that brings them joy at work.

Beyond potential value of AI in early detection, automation will be a boon for oncologists to have a more sustainable, streamlined workload. The oncologists we work with consistently share how their work demands a balance of precision and compassion. They want to focus on their patients, not their charts.

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“It has helped keep me sane, it significantly improves my quality of life. In addition, it helps patients by keeping my thoughts organized, allowing me time to think about patient care rather than spending it on charting.
- Oncologist at Large Health System

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Let’s redefine what’s possible in oncology care, together. Get a live demo of how Commure Ambient AI can work for your practice at ASCO GI in San Francisco.

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North East Medical Services (NEMS) completed a ten-week, head-to-head pilot comparing multiple AI scribing tools, with Commure Ambient AI emerging as a finalist against another large, Epic-integrated AI scribe solution. After testing across diverse ambulatory settings, NEMS selected Commure Ambient AI for full Epic integration.

Key factors driving the decision included superior multilingual capabilities, flexible note generation, strong AI platform partnership potential, and exceptional service quality. Commure Ambient AI stood out as the ideal choice for enhancing clinical documentation.‍

Meeting Complex Needs with Multilingual Support

NEMS, a prominent health system in the San Francisco Bay Area, serves a patient population where over 70% of patients speak primarily Cantonese and Mandarin. Robust translation services were an essential criteria as NEMS sought a solution to alleviate clinicians' documentation burdens while providing quality, culturally-sensitive and linguistically competent care.

Commure’s ambient AI technology rose to the occasion, seamlessly integrating into NEMS' Epic workflows and offering language support for Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, as well as combined dialects like Spanglish and Chinglish. This feature, in addition to our deep commitment to hands-on customer service, set Commure apart from competitors.

NEMS appreciated Commure's responsiveness, collaborative iteration process, and commitment to integrating provider feedback effectively. Commure worked closely with NEMS’ EHR system administrators to ensure seamless integration with Epic workflows. Hands-on, on-site training ensured providers were comfortable and confident using the clinical documentation technology from day one.

Improved Patient Experience and Time Savings

The pilot concluded with significant time savings, and providers reporting they could leave work 20 to 30 minutes earlier than usual—a difference maker in work-life balance.

Beyond time savings, providers have seen a tangible difference in their patient interactions. 

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“I feel like I can listen more actively during patient encounters. I did not anticipate how much it actually improves my time and interactions with my patients. Commure has really been a lifesaver.” - Dr. Lauren Quan, NEMS

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Across the core group of participating providers, usage of Commure’s ambient AI saw a dramatic rise of 87% over the 30 days. Clinicians quickly embraced the solution, integrating it into their daily workflows, with a 73% utilization rate among fully engaged providers (above average compared to industry standards for utilization ranging between 50-66%).

Commure Ambient AI is highly scalable and adaptable to any clinical context; Configuring more scribe templates for specialized workflows—such as pediatrics, gynecology, and annual physical exams—will drive even greater efficiency and adoption rates in the future.‍

Advancing Healthcare with Ambient AI

Commure’s solution sets a new standard for what ambient AI technology can achieve in healthcare, by combining superior multilingual translation services with seamless EHR integration.

Take it from Dr. Jerry Jew, VP and Chief Strategy Officer, at NEMS: 

“Healthcare is in drastic need of innovations that can help providers be providers... allowing clinicians to spend more time and attention with patients instead of writing the medical notes. I found the Commure [Ambient AI scribe] to be accurate, reliable, and flexible. I am pleased with the product and my patients were amazed when reading the note!"

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To discuss how Commure Ambient can meet the needs of your clinicians and patients in a multilingual context, meet with Commure leadership at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. 

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Get in Touch

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As 2024 wraps up, we’re proud to support healthcare’s frontlines with AI-powered solutions tackling their toughest challenges. Commure now partners with over 80 major health systems, including HCA, Tenet Healthcare, Jefferson Health, and Boston Children’s, serving hundreds of thousands of providers. Our platform generates 5M+ annual ambient notes, processes billions of dollars in claims, and continues to redefine healthcare innovation.

In 2024, we made strides in empowering providers, streamlining workflows, and enhancing patient care. From acquisitions to partnerships and new features, here’s a look at the milestones that shaped this transformative year in healthcare.

1. Commure Ambient Became the Largest, Fastest Growing AI Documentation Tool in the Country.

Commure Ambient has become the industry-leading AI-powered documentation platform, setting a new standard for efficiency and innovation in healthcare. This year, we announced the largest AI deployments with HCA and Tenet Healthcare, transforming care at scale.

With nearly 10M annual appointments and billions in productivity savings, Commure Ambient is the largest ambient documentation platform, saving physicians 2 hours daily and cutting documentation time by 80%. Seamlessly integrated with 30+ EMRs, including Epic and Cerner, it streamlines workflows across the industry.

Commure's PatientKeeper is foundational to maximizing patient time and clinical efficiency by streamlining documentation and charge capture. PatientKeeper now integrates AI-driven summaries and autonomous coding, serving 85,000+ professionals, documenting 3.4M+ clinical notes, capturing 20M+ inpatient orders, and processing $3B+ in charges annually.

2. Athelas RCM Grew to Billions of Dollars in Processed Claims, Growing Revenue for Thousands of Clinicians using AI

The beginning of 2024 brought an unexpected financial crisis for health systems and practices across the country, with Change Healthcare’s cybersecurity attack.

Athelas, Commure's revenue cycle product line, worked through swift partnerships with clearinghouses and engineering agility to restore operations to ensure uninterrupted claims submissions for clients within days.

These efforts underscore our commitment to empowering healthcare providers with reliable, efficient tools during critical moments. Wrapping up the year, our revenue cycle management solution achieved its best growth yet, processing $4 billion in claims and driving an impressive 15-20% average increase in the percentage of collections.

3. Strongline Is Now the Nation's Largest Duress Platform, with Expansion into RTLS and Asset Tracking

It has been a powerhouse year for Strongline, Commure’s industry-leading advanced RTLS- and sensor-platform. Driven by the Pro platform, we released a wide range of upgrades such as new 5-year batteries, real-time AI-enabled dashboards, and new product lines such as Asset Management, Camera Integrations, and Patient Elopement.

Strongline now protects 250,000+ caregivers across more than 50 Enterprise health systems such as Cincinnati Children’s, UCLA, Ochsner Health, NY Presbyterian, and Prisma Health. Coverage expanded by the equivalent of 4,000 Olympic-sized pools, and the system helped keep caregivers safe during more than 40,000 duress incidents.

In addition to serving caregivers inside the four walls, we expanded coverage to outdoor and garage spaces utilizing a long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN), AND launched the Strongline Companion App for Home Health and Community care, extending duress alerting to off-campus environments through integrated GPS tracking, automated check-ins, 911 integration, and Ambient AI integration.

Between the tens of thousands of assets being optimized, and hundreds of thousands of people receiving an additional layer of safety, Strongline is well positioned for the evolving needs of the leading healthcare institutions in the country.

4. Driving AI Adoption through Forward Deployed Engineering with HCA Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare

Forward Deployed Engineering at Commure took flight this year. By embedding our teams alongside frontline clinicians and administrators to rapidly co-develop solutions that address healthcare’s most pressing challenges. Hand-in-hand with the people who experience the problems day-to-day, we move swiftly from ideas to functional prototypes, through refinement, secured assessments, and scale deployments faster than ever. It’s a model grounded in our data DNA—the cohesive Commure suite for delivering tailored, last-mile results.

HCA Healthcare: Iteration at the Point of Care

In partnership with HCA Healthcare, our forward deployed engineers created a multi-specialty, EHR-agnostic platform directly within clinical workflows. This collaboration enabled real-time feedback loops; as Dr. Vikesh Tahiliani, VP of Care Transformation and Innovation at HCA, described in the on-demand webinar,

Providers would see a patient, then return to give our engineers feedback—by the next patient visit, the requested changes were already live. - Vikesh Tahiliani, MD

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The result is a solution that truly fits clinician needs, improving efficiency and patient outcomes alike in the most challenging care settings of ED, Acute, and more.

Tenet Healthcare: Scaling Ambient AI Nationwide

Meanwhile, Tenet Healthcare is rapidly rolling out Commure’s ambient AI platform throughout its enterprise physician network. Phillip Ludwig, CEO of Tenet Physician Resources, said:

We chose Commure for their provider-centric approach to innovation, and we’re excited to bring their AI platform to our national network to enhance experiences for our patients, providers, and care teams.

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By immersing the brightest engineering teams in coordination with Tenet’s clinicians, we ensured that each new feature aligns directly with day-to-day demands.

From faster iterations to more precise implementations, forward deployed engineering propels Commure’s mission to deliver the healthcare solutions providers need—when and where they need them most.

5. Memora Health Joins Commure Engage to Redefine Patient Engagement

To expand our AI-powered healthcare portfolio, Commure acquired and integrated Memora Health into CommureOS, enhancing our industry-leading patient engagement platform, Commure Engage. With 100M+ annual patient touchpoints, Engage sets the standard for connecting patients and providers.

Memora’s digital care tools strengthen our suite of solutions, including remote monitoring, documentation, revenue cycle management, and RTLS, transforming patient care at scale. Powered by CommureOS’s integration engine, this unified platform enables seamless experiences across the healthcare journey, reaffirming our commitment to data-driven innovation.

Looking Ahead to 2025

We’ve never been more optimistic about the future. As we continue to serve the nation’s leading healthcare institutions, we are excited to deploy our industry-leading AI solutions to help our customers automate labor-intensive processes, reduce costs, and ultimately improve patient care outcomes. The impact of AI in healthcare is accelerating, and we’re ready to drive this change alongside our partners.

We look forward to helping healthcare providers focus on what matters most: their patients.

Get in touch to learn how we can help you achieve these goals.

Request a Meeting‍

Today I’m excited to share that Commure/Athelas is signing to acquire Augmedix (NASDAQ: AUGX) and take the company private. Combined, we believe we’re creating one of the largest, most comprehensive, and fastest-growing artificial intelligence software suites in healthcare.

Augmedix is a pioneer in the space of Ambient AI-powered medical scribing, with technology and personnel serving over 20 major health systems and hundreds of sites of care. Together, we believe we can dramatically boost the productivity of every physician in America using language models that transcribe appointments, autonomously code them, and supercharge back-office operations for billing teams.

The companies together are on track to power over 3 million physician appointments using artificial intelligence, ambient scribing, and revenue cycle automation this year. Commure/Athelas Scribe, and Augmedix Go on average save a physician 2 hours of documentation time a day, reducing documentation time by more than 80%, and help generate billions of dollars in productivity savings for providers across the country.

Augmedix and Commure/Athelas both partner closely with the country’s premiere hospital systems.  Augmedix’s progress in deploying LLM-powered technology within those systems has been genuinely amazing.

Commure/Athelas today processes billions of dollars worth of healthcare payments, and has the fastest growing Ambient AI scribe + documentation tool deployed within hundreds of health systems and private practices. Our technology suite helps power over 250,000 providers nationally. And with the Augmedix acquisition that number will grow even further.

As I’ve gotten to know Ian and Manny - founder and CEO respectively at Augmedix - it’s become clear they share a common passion with Commure/Athelas for deploying artificial intelligence to supercharge provider operations and boost the productivity of the US economy.

In line with the health assurance vision, we believe this combination further unlocks an ecosystem of companies that can collaborate to transform healthcare. In partnership with Augmedix, Commure/Athelas is poised to become the single, AI-powered interface for providers, accelerating innovation and our shared goal of creating a more proactive, accessible, and affordable system of care.

In the coming months, we hope to announce much more about how the combined company’s product suites will help transform provider operations at all the systems we partner with.

As a former health system CEO, I know that ensuring appropriate staffing remains a top priority.  But a staggering 85% of hospital nurses plan to leave their current position within the next year.  Today’s challenging workforce environment is going to get even tougher: an expected 193,100 nurses will retire every year through 2032.  And that exodus will occur while the US population continues to age, with the 2050 national demographics mimicking Florida in 2020.  

Digging deeper, National Nurses United (NNU) surveyed nurses between January and December of 2023 on the impact of workplace violence and found that 65% reported anxiety, fear, or the need for increased vigilance at work, and 37% considered leaving the profession entirely. Given that Becker’s reported that 86% of nurses say that a safer work environment would make them more likely to stay, these numbers are particularly troubling. And beyond turnover and other economic costs, workplace violence is simply unacceptable.  

Nurses are a cornerstone of health systems and of our society, but what can be done?

To answer this question, I had the privilege of moderating a panel of industry experts in a webinar hosted by Modern Healthcare to discuss the evidence-based approach to workplace violence with a focus on technologies and processes utilized by leading healthcare organizations:

Joe Byham - VP of Public Safety at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health

Melissa Jones - Network Director of Workplace Violence Prevention Program at Inspira Health Network

Erin Jaynes - Chief Nursing Executive and Strategic Advisor at Commure Strongline

Watch the Full Webinar

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Enabling Healthcare Workplace Safety

Staff-Inclusive Programs
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Too often decisions are made by healthcare organizations on new procedures or technologies without involving the end users whose day-to-day lives are affected by these changes. As Melissa Jones explains:

“If you pick a system and you don’t involve the staff and the staff don’t like it, they will find a workaround or they will just not use it, and you have basically wasted your money.”

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To ensure staff buy-in, healthcare organizations must actively involve frontline workers in both the development and implementation of staff safety measures. At Inspira Health, for example, Melissa Jones shared that their workplace violence committee consists of “at least 50 percent direct line staff,” ensuring that those who are most affected by violence have a voice in shaping the solutions. Erin Jaynes echoed this sentiment saying “Let your staff tell you what they want. If you ask, they will tell you.”

The Role of Technology
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Technology is a cornerstone of patient safety and the same opportunities exist to keep team members safe.  When it comes to technologies that address workplace safety in healthcare, one category stands out among the rest: staff duress alerting solutions such as Commure Strongline. Joe Byham agrees saying:

‍“The biggest thing we ever did, bar none, has been implementing the Strongline wearable duress badge, and it’s really not even close; people feel safe and it shows results in the reduction in injuries without a doubt.”

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Just having onsite security personnel, video monitoring and fixed location panic buttons is wholly inadequate. All staff must be protected and actions and interventions need to be guided by data and analytics, just as they do in patient safety.  Wearable duress badges achieve exactly that, as Joe adds:

“We now know where you are and how to get there. We know exactly who we’re going to. We’re not running around looking for you. And it really has reduced our security response time.”

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While nurses are most commonly on the frontlines experiencing the bulk of workplace violence, this issue extends to everyone working in a patient-facing capacity. Melissa Jones provides insight into her own workplace:

‍“When we talk about personal duress buttons, every single one of our staff in our hospitals have one. I don’t care if you’re EVS, if you’re finance, I don’t care who you are. You are going to have a duress button because workplace violence is on the rise.”

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Knowing help is just a button press away helps to ease the anxiety and fear surrounding workplace violence and it is instrumental in enabling assistance for early de-escalation to avoid further harm.‍

Gaining Leadership Buy-In Through ROI
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Investing in solutions like duress alerting to keep staff safe isn’t just a moral imperative, it’s also a business imperative. Industry data shows a single act of workplace violence is costly: The average cost per workplace violence victim due to disability and leave time is nearly $20,000, while the average cost to replace a single nurse is $56,000, according to NSI Nursing Solutions. That quickly adds up, according to Erin Jaynes:

"You can look at how many staff leave every year due to workplace violence. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent depending on the type of incidents that an organization is experiencing. Then you have healthcare costs and potential liability expenses for people who are injured due to workplace violence, who on average, cost somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 million a year that organizations are spending on workplace violence.” 

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Speaking specifically to Commure’s Strongline duress badges Erin said, “there is almost an instantaneous ROI that will happen when you deploy these types of systems that we’re talking about in that you are going to hear from nurses and other staff who say, ‘I’m never going to work at another place that doesn’t have something like this.’”

By facilitating rapid de-escalation and reducing incident intervention times, Strongline curtails these harmful financial impacts of WPV and supports a robust culture of safety. We have seen hospitals and health systems recoup the cost of the system within 3-4 months, and reduce annual incident costs by up to 30%.

Why Staff Retention Starts with Keeping Staff Safe from Harm

Keeping team members safe from workplace violence is a leader’s number one responsibility. It is also an essential investment with a significant return.  Preventing and mitigating workplace violence requires innovative technology solutions and adherence to evidence-based best practices along with direct feedback from those working on the frontlines. This blog covers only  a few aspects of what the panel had to share on this important topic, including how to involve staff in ideation, how to effectively implement duress badge technology, and approaches to demonstrate ROI to leadership.

To dive deeper into this topic and learn how you can transform your organization’s safety, watch the full on demand webinar and discover practical steps to create a safer, more secure environment for your healthcare team.

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Watch the Full Webinar

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