The majority of what happens in a hospital stay is invisible to ambient scribes. We built a system of intelligence that can see and understand the full clinical picture.
In February, we expanded chart awareness to key features throughout Ambience's offering. Now we're excited to share that chart awareness is enabled end-to-end across the entire inpatient workflow, from admission to discharge.
The Complexity of Inpatient Medicine
Hospital medicine is nothing like a single clinic visit. A hospitalist may be managing ten or more patients simultaneously, each at a different stage of their stay, with evolving diagnoses, shifting labs and medication changes accumulating day over day. The information needed to manage acute and chronic conditions is scattered across prior notes, lab panels, imaging reports, medication orders and specialist updates. This means that no single clinician holds the full picture at any given moment and better context becomes critical to delivering better care.
As a patient's stay progresses, each provider must not only document what happened on their shift, but synthesize that against everything that came before. In practice, this rarely happens cleanly. Due to high cognitive load and hospital time pressure, many clinicians copy yesterday's note forward, which risks carrying stale findings into today's record. New lab values, medication adjustments and overnight developments can easily be left out of the note entirely. That critical context gets lost between shifts, between departments and across care teams. And the more incomplete the record, the harder every handoff becomes.
And consequences compound downstream: documentation that doesn't fully reflect the complexity of care delivered can't be translated into the right billable codes, meaning that health systems don't get appropriately compensated for the care they've actually provided.
Why Hasn't This Been Solved?
Healthcare has seen a wave of AI investment in recent years, but most of these tools are either built for the outpatient world or only specific parts of the inpatient world.
In an outpatient setting, AI scribes usually follow a predictable flow: a clinician enters the room, has a conversation with their patient, the AI listens and generates a note. That works well when the encounter is a single interaction and the patient is communicative.
Inpatient medicine doesn't work that way. In roughly half of all inpatient encounters, spoken conversation doesn’t apply: patients may be sedated, cognitively impaired or simply unable to give a reliable history. Non-conversational data—the labs, the medication changes, the imaging, the prior diagnoses—is what actually drives documentation and care. We found that 70% of clinically important inpatient diagnoses have no signal in the transcript at all. And that percentage rises for the diagnoses that matter most for appropriate coding and reimbursement (the CC/MCCs).
Without the data that only exist in the chart, A&P sections miss diagnoses, progress notes continue to carry stale findings forward, and discharge summaries omit critical information, leading to care gaps, flawed quality metrics and lost revenue. We've brought in new tools, but not much meaningful impact.
We Built Something Different
An intelligence platform for inpatient medicine has to reflect how clinicians actually think, performing higher-order synthesis not only across the full patient record, but also across the documentation standards that drive clinical clarity and coding precision.
Ambience was built with this in mind from the start. Rather than listening to a single encounter, Ambience reads and reasons over the patient's full record, pulling in all the right non-conversational data from disparate sources to deliver a complete picture of the patient. Labs, vitals, medication changes, imaging, orders, prior notes: all of it synthesized across the entire workflow.
This approach to clinical quality isn't an afterthought. At Ambience, we pair clinicians with our engineers at every step of the building process, because understanding what clinicians need is what makes it possible to build tools they actually trust. We capture clinicians' judgment, contextual nuance, and reasoning patterns delivering high-quality output even in complex, ambiguous, or incomplete clinical scenarios. And the results speak for themselves: At Saint Luke's Health System, utilization across H&P notes, progress notes, and discharge summaries exceeded 70%, with NPS scores rising 31 points. **We deployed a tool that clinicians use and actually find valuable at more than twice the average utilization. And as more clinicians use these tools, documentation quality improves at scale — which leads to better downstream care for patients and correct reimbursement for the health systems.
A System of Intelligence that Follows the Patient
Chart-awareness is foundational to everything we build, from accurate notes that evolve with the patient's stay to revenue integrity optimization that works at the point of care. Today's announcement brings chart awareness to our full Inpatient offering and introduces Patient Summary to the inpatient suite. Here's where Ambience shows up:
[NEW] Patient Summary: Before the hospitalist enters the room, Ambience synthesizes the patient's longitudinal history, giving clinicians the specific context they need to orient quickly to patients.
H&P Notes: Generates the full H&P from the bedside interaction, if applicable, alongside chart data.
Diagnoses: Surfaces missed conditions and precise ICD-10 codes with supporting evidence in real time, drawing from the bedside interaction, hospital problem list and months of chart data to ensure clinical complexity is accurately captured.
Progress Notes: Builds each note from the prior day’s note together with the current bedside interaction (if one occurred) and real-time chart data. A progress note no longer depends on a recording or a copy/paste from the prior day.
Hospital Stay Summary: Synthesizes the patient’s full admission, helping to ensure quick and seamless handoff between care teams with full patient context.
Discharge Summary: Constructs a final discharge summary from the complete hospital stay in one click, with the option to enrich it via a recorded discharge conversation.
We're proud to deliver an inpatient platform that covers every step of a patient stay, combining comprehensive longitudinal clinical intelligence and seamless documentation to drive quality, optimize revenue, and achieve operational excellence. And our deployments thus far have proven the impact of better context: In evaluations at four health systems, chart-aware discharge summaries resolved 91% of previously missing information.
When clinician notes reflect the full clinical picture, the note becomes a trustworthy patient record rather than a liability, and everything downstream changes in kind. Diagnoses are accurately captured, handoffs are cleaner, and clinicians are freed from cognitive burden. And most importantly, this means patients receive the best possible care, grounded in the full context of their stay.
This is what it means to build a connected infrastructure that makes better outcomes possible at scale.
