Collaboration is one of several new Sutter Health innovations to improve the doctor-patient experience

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Northern California-based, not-for-profit Sutter Health today announced it is working with Augmedix to benefit from the power of Google Cloud. Sutter Health has one of the largest deployments on Augmedix’s documentation platform, which now runs on Google Cloud Platform. The collaboration is one of several new Sutter Health innovations for patients and healthcare providers to help make the healthcare experience more simple, engaging and human.

“We are committed to creating new and meaningful ways to support our patients and clinicians,” said Albert Chan, M.D., chief of digital patient experience at Sutter Health and a family medicine doctor who uses Augmedix and Glass Enterprise Edition with patients during clinic visits. “Glass with Augmedix takes care of many of the administrative visit tasks, which allows doctors to focus on what we care most about—helping our patients.”

Now that Augmedix is powered by Google Cloud Platform, Sutter plans to add a machine learning tool to assist doctors by triaging in-box messages from patients, as appropriate. Future plans include implementing more GCP-enabled AI and machine learning modules to supercharge scribing services so they can support doctors in other ways as they are caring for patients.

“Our work on GCP has been accelerating as we continue to advance our capabilities using Google Cloud machine learning APIs and core HIPAA-secure cloud infrastructure services,” said Ian Shakil, Co-founder and CEO of Augmedix. “As our largest deployment, Sutter represents an at-scale example of what’s possible when you bring together a technology-enabled documentation service for health systems and the power of the cloud.”

Dr. Chan views the program as an opportunity to build upon the successes already achieved by Sutter’s teamwork with Augmedix. Originally launched as a pilot program with Augmedix in 2014, the service has demonstrated value to Sutter clinicians and patients by serving as a “healthcare wingman”—freeing doctors from extra time charting thanks to real-time, quality controlled, and customized remote scribes, accessed through Glass. The results include:

•         More accurate notes in a patient’s chart and more detailed after-care instructions, leading to improved patient satisfaction
•         Enhanced productivity—saving doctors an average of two hours a day—ultimately allowing them to focus on other patient needs
•         Reduced physician burnout – just as we take care of our patients, Sutter Health is committed to improving wellness of clinicians.

Currently, more than 100 doctors across the Sutter Health network are using Augmedix and Glass in family and internal medicine, dermatology, podiatry, orthopedics, surgical oncology and cardiology care. Since launching the remote scribe program, Sutter doctors have used Augmedix in hundreds of thousands patient clinic visits.

“We want to improve the patient experience in every way we can,” said Dr. Chan. “Augmedix has helped expand our care team in a seamless and novel way by saving time and allowing for more meaningful face-to-face time and conversations with our patients during their visits.”

Dr. Chan will participate in a special fireside chat at HIMSS18 on Sutter Health’s use of Augmedix and Google Cloud to scale innovations that transform the doctor/patient interaction on March 7 from noon – 12:30 p.m. in the Google Cloud Booth, Level 2, Halls A-D, #2829. More details are available at http://www.himssconference.org/.