Why traditional DMEs hold health care

2025 was declared the year of the AI ​​agent. Although this can be true in general, it is not precise in health care. In our industry, 2025 is undoubtedly the year of the scribe.

Abridge, the atmosphere and other AI ambient scribes aroused unprecedented interests and assessments of venture capital this year. Meanwhile, electronic medical record companies (EMR) established with bases of large and sticky customers, such as those below, go around the owners of investment in multiple income or less.

With this, we have to take a break and reflect on the state of the landscape of the DME and what it means for a compatible future in health care. Each of the above health technology companies has built an important clinical, financial and operational user basis in a total total addressable market of billions of dollars, but has not struck the multiple that investors pay for scribed companies today.

For what? Traditional DMEs are not designed for this. They are designed for compliance and billing capture and use obsolete paradigms in architectural design and user experience. They cannot create software companies in small groups, and even less platforms that can live in the future where AI agents become integrated parts of the care team. Instead of creating new opportunities, traditional DMEs constraint the potential of AI in health care.

The future of health care is agentic

We quickly approach a future that goes far beyond the scribe. Whoever incorporates AI throughout the spectrum of clinical, financial and operational jobs within an outpatient practice. In this world, specialized agents work in a unified data architecture and a chain with several other agents throughout the patient’s journey.

For example, a planning agent automates the reservation of self-service patients and triggers the admission agent to introduce IT in the graph, which in turn provides a deeper context for the documentation agent and / or the clinical co-pilot supporting the clinician during the visit. Post-visiting activities are connected and automated to code, rub, suggest documentation gaps and manage the income cycle.

All of these use cases come quickly and threaten the lifespan of traditional DMEs that do not adapt to pressure.

It must be integrated

There are some challenges that the new agental world presents to the holder:

• One is the user experience; How do we understand that the human decision-maker is in control?
• Another is security; How to protect against hallucinations and bugs, and permanently assess to refine prompts and improve the system?
• A third party is the integration of data and platform capacities; An agent is as good as his tools and his context.

There are more questions when we enter into the technical and architectural details.

• Where should each agent be accommodated?
• How will the shared context be maintained between agents without creating dangerous inconsistencies?
• When an agent brings a change that affects the work of other agents, how will this coordination occur in real time?

Without appropriate orchestration, each new agent means additional brittle integration points and potential conflicts, creating an exponential coordination challenge composed.

One way of getting around this is to integrate agents into the DME, with a series of products grouped through jobs such as intelligent consumption, the summary of graphics, the ambient scribe and the automation of coding. For EMR companies with architecture and technical capacities to achieve this, they can offer AI tools where users are already, increasing their basic experience and avoiding orchestration challenges, as agents take advantage of an underlying system and a common data model.

Nothing matter without evales

What is lacking in all media threshing articles and videos on social networks are tangible results. The industry must prioritize transparency in the effectiveness of AI tools and establish benchmarks that validate its safety. We have to go beyond launching announcements and prototypes in the world of continuous assessment of the safety of AI tools, by testing them against an expert clinical judgment.

The traditional adoption of agents and AI in health care will not be reached without evaluation sections and continuous feedback loops between human practitioners and agency solutions to continuously improve the models and ensure that we are safely increased clinical decisions. The clinician and human agent must coexist and agents must have the tools and the context to stimulate their own improvement.

It will not be possible with traditional DMEs

The inherited market does not have APIs, software developer kits or data access that AI solutions can use to integrate into existing workflows or assess their safety. Without this, our option is a tab in the browser and a manual copy / paste workflow or a lowest common denominator interface that allows data to move through systems and users, but does not allow coordination. This blocks autonomy; Agents cannot work together in the existing paradigm.

Systems like those in the table above and other unre listened names, such as Athenahealth, EclinicalWorks and Allelscripts, which have dominated ambulatory care, were not designed for this new future. Their strategies and resources indicate that they will maximize the current SaaS paradigm and will move slowly (if at all) to support the new one. This has a large cost for clinicians and patients.

As an industry, we have a duty to adopt AI and test it on the verge of its capacities. But we must do so with the awareness of the high challenges of the automation of health care, constantly keeping patient safety. Our opportunity is to do this work and emergency well, and to reach the potential transformer of AI in health care.

Publisher’s note: neither the author nor his business have a relationship with the companies / products mentioned.

Photo: Ipopba, Getty Images

Adam Farren is the CEO of Canvas Medical, the EMR platform accelerating everyday medicine. Before Canvas, he was CGO at Elate Health and Osmind, and led the growth strategy and marketing through startups supported by companies in financial services, education technology and the media. Adam holds a baccalaureate from Princeton University and an MBA from the Haas Business School of the University of California in Berkeley.

This message appears through the Medcity influencers program. Anyone can publish their point of view on business and innovation in health care on Medcity News through Medcity influencers. Click here to find out how.