From TekinHealthHealthcare Tech Field Notes

The Department of Veterans Affairs selected Abridge under a five-year, multi-award enterprise contract with a ceiling of $775.72 million to provide ambient AI scribes. Knowtex also holds a seat on the contract. The VA began piloting ambient scribes from both vendors in October 2025. The tool is now available to primary care, behavioral health, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and medical and surgical specialty clinicians at more than 75 VA medical centers. Abridge says its scribe runs on both the VA's legacy VistA/CPRS system and the new Oracle Health federal EHR.

Why it's notable: This is one of the largest single ambient AI deployments in US healthcare, and it spans two different EHR platforms. How it goes at the VA will be a reference point for other large systems deciding whether to scale AI scribes.

OpenEvidence released a family of medical AI search models on September 3. Three are free to verified clinicians on its website and iOS and Android apps: Osler answers in about five seconds for questions during a visit, Sackett runs a deeper search in about 30 seconds, and Snow does a full literature review in about five minutes. A fourth model, Darwin, is available by application only to research partners such as the National Organization for Rare Disorders. The company says Darwin is the first model to score 100% on the MedQA benchmark and that it will add Darwin's capabilities to the three clinician models as safeguards are validated.

Why it's notable: OpenEvidence is one of the AI reference tools doctors use most. It now lets clinicians choose between fast answers at the point of care and slower, deeper evidence reviews. The benchmark results are the company's own claims and measure exam-style questions, not patient outcomes.

On August 13, 2026, athenahealth made its AI features, including its own ambient scribe athenaAmbient, generally available across the athenaOne network of more than 170,000 physicians and clinicians. The tool records the patient visit on desktop or iOS and drafts the note. It also suggests possible diagnoses, recommends order types and flags care gaps. athenahealth says the tool is included in the core athenaOne subscription at no extra charge. The company says clinicians using it since late 2025 spend about six fewer minutes per encounter on chart prep and documentation, and that early adopters raised same-day chart completion by up to 30%.

Why it's notable: Independent and small practices on athenaOne now get an ambient scribe as part of their EHR fee instead of paying a separate vendor. This follows Epic in building the scribe into the record system and puts pricing pressure on standalone scribe companies.

Twelve US health systems announced a Diagnostic AI Consortium with Aidoc on August 11, 2026. Members are Advocate Health, Cedars-Sinai, Hartford HealthCare, Houston Methodist, Mercy, Mount Sinai, Northwell Health, Northwestern Medicine, Sutter Health, UF Health, University Hospitals of Cleveland and WellSpan Health, which together care for nearly 20 million patients a year. The group plans to co-design AI-assisted diagnostic workflows, measure their effect on safety, quality and time to diagnosis across member sites, and agree on shared evaluation and governance practices. Aidoc is supplying the technology through its CARE foundation model and aiOS platform, and the group expects to share its first results in 2027.

Why it's notable: Health systems usually evaluate imaging AI one site at a time. Here a dozen large systems are pooling evidence on whether it actually speeds diagnosis, which could set the standards other hospitals use when they buy and govern these tools.

On April 23, 2026, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Clinicians, a version of ChatGPT for clinical work such as documentation, medical research and care questions, free to US physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and pharmacists who verify their NPI and license. Responses cite journal sources, and eligible questions can earn CME credit. OpenAI also released HealthBench Professional, an open benchmark for clinician chat tasks, and says that before launch it tested nearly 7,000 real clinical conversations, with 99.6% of responses rated accurate and safe.

Why it's notable: A free, citation-backed AI assistant from a major AI lab competes directly with paid clinical reference and search tools. Many clinicians will now have it within easy reach.

On April 16, 2026, Hippocratic AI launched Nurse Co-Pilot, an AI voice assistant for inpatient nurses built with Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, OhioHealth and Cleveland Clinic, which are the first to use it. It starts with patient-facing tasks such as admission education, patient education, caregiver engagement and medication-related support, and the company says it can give nurses back 1 to 4 hours per shift. Hippocratic also launched an 'AI Front Door' voice agent that handles incoming patient calls.

Why it's notable: Patient-facing AI agents are moving beyond call centers onto hospital floors, taking over routine education and discharge conversations that nurses now spend hours on.

On April 15, 2026, ambient scribe company Abridge announced multi-year content deals with NEJM Group and the American Medical Association's JAMA Network. Content from those journals will feed Abridge's clinical decision support, where clinicians ask questions inside the EHR and get cited answers that draw on both published research and the patient conversation. Decision support using UpToDate content is already live, and Abridge said the NEJM and JAMA content would become generally available in the following months. Abridge says it serves about 250 large US health systems.

Why it's notable: Ambient scribes are adding evidence lookup, which puts them in competition with clinical reference tools.

Mount Sinai Health System announced on March 31, 2026 that it is rolling out OpenEvidence, an AI medical search tool, inside its Epic EHR across its seven hospitals. It is giving access to physicians, registered nurses and pharmacists. OpenEvidence answers clinical questions in plain language, with citations to peer-reviewed literature and guidelines. Coverage described it as OpenEvidence's first enterprise-wide deal with a health system.

Why it's notable: Clinicians have mostly used OpenEvidence on their own phones. This deal makes it a sanctioned tool inside the EHR for the whole care team, which is a model other health systems may follow to govern clinicians' use of AI.

Before HIMSS26, Microsoft announced on March 5, 2026 that Dragon Copilot now connects to Microsoft 365 Copilot. A new Work IQ layer lets clinicians pull email, Teams, schedules and documents into the same assistant they use to write notes. Microsoft says the product can draft prior authorization requests from the chart and a payer's coverage criteria. It also opened a marketplace for third-party agents, with launch partners Optum, Regard, Humata Health and Canary Speech. The release also adds nursing flowsheet documentation, with a radiology integration in US preview. Microsoft says more than 100,000 clinicians use Dragon Copilot.

Why it's notable: One of the two biggest ambient scribe vendors is turning its note-taking tool into a general clinical assistant that takes on admin work like prior authorization. That changes what health systems are buying when they pick a scribe.

On February 4, 2026, Epic made AI Charting broadly available to its EHR customers. The tool listens during patient visits, drafts the clinician's note and queues up suggested orders from the conversation. Clinicians must review and sign off on all drafts and orders. Epic first previewed the tool at its August 2025 users group meeting. It is part of Epic's Art suite of clinician AI tools, and Epic says a chart-summary feature in that suite is now used more than 16 million times a month. Epic has not published a separate price for AI Charting.

Why it's notable: Epic runs the EHR at about 42% of US acute care hospitals, so a scribe built into the EHR puts direct pressure on standalone vendors like Abridge, Microsoft's Dragon Copilot and Ambience. It also gives Epic customers a ready alternative to buying a separate scribe.

On January 11, 2026, as the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference opened, Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare, a set of HIPAA-ready AI tools for health systems, payers and patients. It includes built-in connections to the CMS Coverage Database, ICD-10 codes, the NPI Registry and PubMed, which Anthropic pitches for prior authorization, claims appeals, coding and care coordination. The company says the product runs on its Claude Opus 4.5 model. Record company HealthEx said it had become the first way for consumers to connect their health records to Claude, and Apple Health and Android Health Connect integrations were set to roll out in beta in the Claude mobile apps.

Why it's notable: A second major AI lab is now selling HIPAA-ready tools that connect directly to the Medicare coverage and coding data behind prior authorization and appeals, one of the biggest administrative costs for clinics and payers.

On January 7, 2026, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health, a separate health space inside ChatGPT where US users can connect their medical records through the health data network b.well, which covers about 2.2 million US providers. Users can also connect apps including Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, Weight Watchers, Peloton and Function. OpenAI says more than 230 million people ask ChatGPT health questions each week and that the product was built with feedback from more than 260 physicians. The company says ChatGPT Health is not meant for diagnosis or treatment and that health conversations are not used to train its models. It launched first to a small group of early users, and the record connections are US-only. On January 12, OpenAI bought the health-records startup Torch to build out the product, for a price reported at $60 million to $100 million.

Why it's notable: The most widely used consumer chatbot can now read patients' own records, so more patients will arrive at visits with AI interpretations of their lab results and charts.

At HLTH 2025, Microsoft added an ambient AI capability for nurses to Dragon Copilot. It captures nurse-patient conversations at the bedside and turns them into flowsheet entries in the EHR, which the nurse reviews before they are filed. The feature runs inside Epic Rover, the mobile app nurses already use. Baptist Health and Mercy are early adopters, and Microsoft said general availability for U.S. nurses would begin in December 2025. Microsoft also opened Dragon Copilot to partner apps and agents from companies including Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer UpToDate, Cohere Health and Press Ganey.

Why it's notable: Most ambient AI so far has been aimed at physician notes. Nurses do much of the charting in a hospital, so a scribe built into their flowsheets and mobile workflow could relieve a large share of the documentation burden.