For every 20-minute phone call between a health care provider and patient, the provider spends 130 minutes writing notes and updating the electronic medical records system.
AI startup Beam Health wants to reduce that over two-hour-long process to just three minutes with its artificial intelligence tool that aims to revolutionize medical documentation.
Beam Health, founded by Sas Ponnapalli, is helping health care providers spend less time with administrative tasks and notetaking thanks to its AI tool Shine AI. Launched six months ago, Shine AI listens to consultations between providers and patients, transcribes the conversation, and generates comprehensive clinical notes, streamlining the documentation process and integrating directly into EMRs.
Shine is already in use at over 1,200 providers across nine networks, saving doctors countless time and money by using AI to augment intake and documentation workflows.
“These inefficiencies cost over $64 billion annually,” Ponnapalli said. “There's a lot of AI solutions out there and they're solving a particular piece of that patient journey. But our vision is to focus on that complete picture.”
Ponnapalli said Beam Health plans to launch three to four new AI agents a year, giving providers the ability to automate things like revenue operations, reputation management, and other time-consuming business tasks that take health care providers away from their patients.
“Our vision here is to reduce every time consuming gap in medicine,” he said.
Ponnapalli founded Beam Health in 2020. Prior to Beam, he was the CTO at telehealth firm PlushCare, which sold to Accolade for $450 million. At PlushCare, he saw how cumbersome the charting and documentation process was, and decided to build AI infrastructure for doctors that could eliminate those hours of wasted time.
As companies across industries today adopt AI tools to make their operations more efficient, Ponnapalli believes the health care space is in position to bring AI into more of its workflows, and Beam is ready to meet that demand.
“The demand is there,” he said. “This is a real problem that doctors are having where they're wasting large parts of their day typing out charts … If you can create a way that automates 99% of these tasks, there's a huge opportunity for that.”