Nonprofit health care network Catalight has tapped tech company Nabla to cut down on paperwork in the intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) field using AI.

Catalight, a Walnut Creek, California-based company, announced this week a partnership with Nabla, in order to use the company’s AI ambient assistant.

Under the agreement, Catalight’s clinical staff, which include case managers and consultants, access Nabla’s product through their electronic medical records (EMRs).

The ambient assistant transcribes conversations and provides summary notes of a patient visit for the clinician’s recordkeeping. It also supplies take home notes for the patient and their parent or caregiver.

During a six-week program pilot, Catalight said that its clinicians reported saving 55 minutes a day on documentation tasks.

“It is the writing of the report afterwards that they no longer do,” Tracy Gayeski, chief health officer at Catalight, told Autism Business News. “The clinician is reading the report and making adjustments but the hard work is done.

“It enhances the time they spend with the client,” Gayeski added. “They can be very present.”

Catalight is a value-based care provider organization that cares for patients with IDDs. The provider cares for 17,000 families on a daily basis.

Catalight’s agreement with Nabla is a year-long, Gayeski said, with the possibility for renewal.

Catalight is an organization with 170 employees, the majority of them clinicians, Gayeski said.

Staff oversee the care and clinical path of their client, while treatment and therapies for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other diagnoses are done by provider partners, Gayeski explained. Most of Catalight’s patients and affiliated providers are based in Northern California.

Nabla is a company founded in 2018 with the purpose of making AI for health care clinicians. Delphine Groll, co-founder and chief operating officer of Nabla, told ABN that the company’s AI engineering takes place in Paris, while over 90% of the sales, marketing and support team is in the U.S.

Groll, who is based in New York herself, said that Nabla has sold its AI documentation products to numerous U.S. health care companies. Nabla collaborates with 18 organizations focused to some degree on behavioral health, and five solely focused on behavioral health, Groll said.

In touting their partnership, Gayeski and Groll said they were helping to solve the problem of clinician burnout. Studies such as a 2022 report that appeared in the National Library of Medicine have found that health care workers serving children with ASD often have, “adverse psychological states that manifest as anxiety and depression.”

According to Groll, part of Nabla’s mission is to “decrease the workload, burnout and exhaustion from clinical tasks.”

“AI is not a threat,” Groll said. “It can help make health care more accessible.”