How Elation Health Uses Claude to Speed Up Clinical Chart Review

Primary care physicians face a relentless documentation burden before every patient visit. Reviewing longitudinal patient charts—synthesizing notes, labs, vitals, medications, and problem lists—consumes precious time and mental energy that could otherwise go toward patient care. Elation Health, a clinical EHR and billing platform serving over 46,000 clinicians and 24 million patients, built its Clinical Insights feature specifically to address this bottleneck.

The initial implementation relied on a competing AI model, but three critical problems emerged: median response times stretched to 26 seconds, summaries lacked verifiable citations that clinicians needed to trust the output, and the engineering team required complex prompt engineering workarounds just to achieve acceptable quality. The combination undermined adoption and clinical utility.

Elation Health evaluated Claude and found it addressed all three problems simultaneously. Claude delivered dramatically faster responses, generated chart summaries with clear source citations linking back to original chart data, and required no complex prompt workarounds. The migration to Claude was executed as a direct replacement of the previous model provider.

The impact was immediate and measurable. Median time to first insight dropped by 61%, transforming the feature from a slow auxiliary tool into a seamless part of clinical workflow. Adoption of Clinical Insights doubled post-migration, reflecting the step-change in both speed and trustworthiness. For primary care physicians managing hundreds of patients, shaving seconds off every chart review compounds into meaningful time savings across a full day of appointments.