The Acute Care Operating System

Cleo Health builds software for the specific, high-pressure environment of emergency departments and inpatient wards. While the medical scribe market is crowded with tools for outpatient visits, Cleo differentiates its platform by focusing on acute care. In these environments, patient encounters are not 15-minute scheduled blocks. They are hours-long processes involving multiple re-evaluations, consultant visits, and shifting clinical priorities. Cleo's platform is built to track these complex, non-linear workflows.

The platform is marketed as an operating system for clinicians, used across more than 400 facilities. Its core product, Ambient Listening, records patient interactions and converts them into structured clinical notes. Unlike standard outpatient scribes that assume a single linear conversation, Cleo's system allows clinicians to update a single note over the course of a shift. This "time-stamped re-evaluation" feature captures initial triage, subsequent bedside check-ins, and the final medical decision-making process as they occur, reducing the need for doctors to recall details hours after the shift ends.

Revenue Integrity and Real-time CDI

Beyond documentation, Cleo targets revenue integrity, a significant pain point for hospital systems where documentation gaps lead to lower reimbursement or compliance risks. The system uses a feature called Encounter Intelligence to provide real-time guidance on Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI). It monitors clinician documentation as it is generated and provides proactive nudges to improve diagnostic specificity. For example, the system might prompt a provider to specify the exact type of heart failure or acuity of a condition, ensuring the hospital can assign the correct Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) for billing.

This revenue-focused approach extends to automated charge capture. By analyzing the documented care in real-time, Cleo helps clinicians ensure that every billable service provided is reflected in the final chart. The company claims that this integration reduces clinician burnout—reporting a 57% reduction in some cases—by shifting the administrative burden of coding and compliance from the physician to the AI engine.

Integration and Security Architecture

The platform is designed to integrate with major Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. This ensures that the AI-generated drafts and supplemental documents, such as handoff notes and discharge summaries, flow directly into the patient's permanent record. The product surface is primarily mobile and web-based, catering to clinicians who move constantly between patient rooms, nursing stations, and the ER floor.

From a technical and compliance standpoint, Cleo operates on a HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and maintains SOC 2 Type II certification. The platform also leverages Microsoft's infrastructure for secure data handling. Large provider groups such as USACS, ApolloMD, and Team Health are listed as partners, indicating that the tool is being used at an enterprise scale across thousands of clinicians.