knownwell leverages Nabla's athenahealth integration to enhance patient care

Charlie Marchal

Product Marketing Manager

Margaux Benoit

Enterprise Sales Director

Balancing thorough documentation with attentive patient care is a major challenge for healthcare organizations like knownwell, a weight-inclusive clinic offering weight management services, primary care, nutrition counseling, and behavioral health services. knownwell’s clinicians aim to deliver personalized, unbiased care, which requires time to understand each patient's needs. However, the time-consuming nature of clinical documentation often limits direct patient interactions.

With a growing patient base and diverse services, knownwell needed a solution to streamline documentation without compromising care quality. The goal was to simplify the process of generating clinical notes while ensuring they remained accurate and comprehensive. As a clinic focused on weight-inclusive care, it was essential to capture the nuanced aspects of metabolic health and lifestyle factors.

After securing $20 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, knownwell was ready to scale its services. They needed an ambient AI assistant that could seamlessly integrate into their workflow across various care settings. Recently featured in CB Insights’ list of the 52 Future Tech Hotshots for 2024, knownwell is adept at integrating new technologies to improve care quality.

Finding the right solution

After evaluating numerous ambient AI assistants, knownwell’s team found Nabla to be the perfect fit.

Our team tried 10 different products, and Nabla was by far the best

– Dr. Angela Fitch, Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer at knownwell

Nabla stood out for several reasons:

• Customization: Nabla’s team worked with knownwell to develop features such as a nutrition template. Clinicians could customize notes with bullet points for diet plans, exercise regimens, and behavioral interventions.
• Short Time-to-Mastery: knownwell’s team was able to integrate Nabla into their workflow without extensive training.
• Accurate Notes: Even during long behavioral health and nutrition sessions, Nabla filtered out small talk and captured relevant information.

Seamless integration with athenahealth

In addition to the reasons outlined above, another pivotal factor in knownwell's decision to choose Nabla was its integration with their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, athenahealth. The notes are now pushed directly into the visit documentation, eliminating the need for copy-pasting and making workflows more efficient. Nabla also enhances the reliability of notes by pulling relevant patient data from athenahealth.

Nabla collaborated with knownwell to customize the integration, creating custom templates and automating data entry for key sections such as History of Present Illness, Physical Exam, and Patient Instructions. The integration involved iterative testing to ensure it met the needs of knownwell’s clinicians.

Clinicians can now capture and review clinical notes in three steps:

1. Before the Encounter: Providers open Nabla within athenahealth, which overlays the patient chart and fills in key demographics.
2. During the Encounter: Nabla transcribes the session in real time, capturing all relevant details, including dietary assessments and care plans.
3. After the Encounter: Nabla generates a comprehensive clinical note, which the provider reviews and exports to athenahealth with one click.

Benefits to clinicians and patients

Nabla has significantly improved operations at knownwell. For clinicians, it streamlines documentation and enhances the accuracy of notes, leading to as much as a 24% reduction in documentation time in the first month of use, eliminating the need for after-hours work. As knownwell’s team becomes more comfortable with the solution and fine-tunes individual preferences, they expect this number to increase in the future.

knownwell’s patients also benefit from more detailed notes, resulting in personalized care and improved health outcomes. Nabla generates comprehensive patient summaries after each visit, offering clear context. In weight management, these detailed instructions are particularly valuable, providing actionable steps for diet, exercise, and treatment. This ensures patients understand and follow their plan, contributing to long-term health outcomes.

At knownwell, we care deeply about forging strong relationships with our patients, especially in light of the poor experience many of them have had with the traditional healthcare system. Nabla has allowed us to be fully present for our patients, while still feeling confident the documentation will be complete and accurate—and all while reducing after-hours documentation time, which is a key driver of clinician burnout.

– Dr. Angela Fitch, Chief Medical Officer at knownwell

As knownwell continues to grow and expand its services, they are offering Nabla to all clinicians.

Is your organization on athenahealth?

We invite you to explore how Nabla can transform your practice. Contact us.