Question 1

What is Cleo Health?

Accepted Answer

Cleo Health is an AI-powered acute care operating system that unifies revenue cycle workflows into a single platform. Instead of managing separate tools for ambient documentation, charge capture, clinical documentation integrity (CDI), and patient assignments, Cleo provides one integrated engine. Cleo is used in 50+ health systems across 400+ facilities and supports more than 3.5 million patient encounters per year.

Question 2

What problems does Cleo Health solve for hospitals and health systems?

Accepted Answer

Health systems typically manage multiple software vendors to cover clinical documentation, charge capture, CDI, coding, and other steps across the revenue cycle. This creates integration complexity, redundant costs, and fragmented workflows. Cleo consolidates all of these into one platform, reducing vendor sprawl, eliminating duplicate integrations, and giving administrators a single source of truth across the revenue cycle.

Question 3

Who is Cleo Health built for?

Accepted Answer

Cleo is built for acute care clinicians, administrators, and organizations. The platform supports individual clinicians including emergency medicine physicians, hospitalists, and other inpatient specialists, as well as enterprise provider staffing organizations, hospitals, and health systems. Cleo's impact is tracked by three key stakeholder groups: clinical leaders prioritizing clinician satisfaction, patient experience, and documentation quality; IT and operations leaders focused on platform consolidation and integration; and revenue cycle leaders focused on charge capture accuracy, DRG optimization, and CMI improvement.

Question 4

How is Cleo's CDI different from companies like SmarterDx, Nuance CDE One, or Solventum?

Accepted Answer

SmarterDx, Nuance CDE One, and Solventum all approach CDI retrospectively, reviewing charts after the patient encounter to find documentation gaps and missed diagnoses. Cleo's CDI works in real time, surfacing documentation prompts and charge capture opportunities during the encounter, while the clinician is still with the patient. This means revenue integrity is built into the clinical workflow rather than added as a separate review step after the fact.

Question 5

How does Cleo Health reduce physician burnout?

Accepted Answer

94% of clinicians using Cleo report decreased documentation burden, and 57% report reduced burnout. Cleo addresses burnout in two ways. First, ambient AI documentation listens to clinician-patient conversations and generates workflow-specific notes automatically, eliminating after-hours charting. Second, because Cleo unifies ambient documentation, charge capture, and real-time CDI in a single platform, clinicians avoid the context switching and disruptive after-the-fact CDI queries that fragment acute care workflows. Unlike general-purpose AI scribes, Cleo is purpose-built for hospital medicine, emergency medicine, and other inpatient specialties.

Question 6

What is ambient documentation and how does it work in Cleo?

Accepted Answer

Ambient documentation uses AI to listen to a patient encounter and automatically generate a structured clinical note without the clinician typing or dictating. In Cleo, ambient documentation is workflow-specific, meaning it produces the right note format for the right encounter type: MDM-optimized notes for emergency medicine, detailed problem-based notes for hospitalists, and custom templates for other inpatient specialties. The clinician reviews and signs rather than writing from scratch. Cleo users save an average of more than 54 minutes of charting per shift.

Question 7

Does Cleo work for emergency medicine physicians as well as hospitalists?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Cleo supports both emergency medicine and hospital medicine workflows. For emergency medicine, this includes precise medical decision making (MDM) documentation for billing accuracy, intelligent procedure capture, and real-time clinical decision score reminders. For hospitalists, Cleo supports all note types including admission notes, progress notes, cross-cover notes, and discharge summaries, with longitudinal assessments and plans. Cleo enterprise customers also get census management, charge capture, and real-time CDI at the point of care.

Question 8

How long does it take for physicians to adopt Cleo?

Accepted Answer

Most clinicians are productive within their first few shifts. Cleo is designed for minimal friction adoption: it runs on existing mobile devices, requires no additional hardware, and is EHR agnostic. That means Cleo works alongside whatever EHR your organization uses, whether embedded or as a standalone tool, without disrupting existing workflows.

Question 9

How does Cleo improve patient experience scores?

Accepted Answer

When clinicians spend less time on documentation, they spend more time focused on the patient in front of them. Cleo returns an average of more than 54 minutes per shift to clinicians by eliminating after-hours charting. The platform also includes real-time patient experience feedback, which scores clinicians on key patient experience criteria during the encounter to keep high-impact behaviors visible. In trials, 90% of clinicians saw their in-platform patient experience scores improve over the course of the trial period.

Question 10

What is real-time CDI and how is it different from retrospective CDI?

Accepted Answer

Clinical Documentation Integrity (CDI) is the process of ensuring clinical documentation is complete, specific, and accurate enough to support proper DRG assignment and reimbursement. Retrospective CDI happens after a patient is discharged: a CDI specialist reviews the record, identifies gaps, and sends queries back to the physician. This is slow, disruptive, and often incomplete. Real-time CDI, as Cleo delivers it, surfaces documentation opportunities to the physician at the point of documentation, so DRG accuracy is achieved before the patient leaves the floor. This eliminates a significant portion of retrospective query volume and supports stronger revenue integrity.

Question 11

How does Cleo help reduce charge leakage?

Accepted Answer

Charge leakage happens for several reasons: documentation often lacks the specificity needed to support the highest accurate DRG level; retrospective CDI queries arrive after discharge when physicians may not remember clinical details or do not respond; and charges captured separately from documentation create additional gaps. Cleo addresses all three by unifying ambient documentation, real-time CDI, and charge capture in a single workflow, surfacing ICD-10 code suggestions in context while the physician is still completing the note.

Question 12

What is the financial ROI of implementing Cleo Health?

Accepted Answer

Cleo drives ROI across several areas. Improved wRVU capture in the emergency department has generated $680,000 in annual savings for organizations by reducing under-coded charts. Real-time CDI has delivered an estimated $243 in savings per patient stay by resolving documentation gaps before discharge rather than after. Health systems also realize meaningful savings from vendor consolidation by replacing multiple point solutions with a single platform, though this varies by organization.

Question 13

How does Cleo improve Case Mix Index (CMI)?

Accepted Answer

CMI improvement through Cleo comes from real-time CDI. Rather than sending retrospective queries after discharge, Cleo surfaces documentation specificity prompts during the encounter, encouraging physicians to document the full complexity, comorbidities, and severity of illness while the clinical details are still fresh. This supports more accurate DRG assignment, ensures high acuity patients are correctly represented, and improves CMI without retrospective rework or added headcount.

Question 14

Can Cleo replace our existing CDI program?

Accepted Answer

Cleo is designed to augment and modernize your CDI program rather than replace your CDI specialists. Real-time CDI queries from Cleo reduce the volume of retrospective queries your CDI team needs to send, freeing specialists to focus on complex cases and strategic work. For organizations looking to scale CDI impact without adding headcount, Cleo is often deployed to handle the high-volume, routine documentation specificity work while CDI specialists focus on escalated cases.

Question 15

How is Cleo's ambient listening product different from those offered by Abridge, Ambience, and Microsoft Dragon Copilot?

Accepted Answer

Abridge, Ambience, Dragon Copilot, Heidi, Freed, and Nabla were built to solve one problem: generating clinical notes from ambient conversation. Cleo includes ambient documentation, but the core of the platform is a fully interconnected clinical operating system for acute care, also unifying real-time CDI, charge capture, and patient assignment management in a single integrated workflow. Clinicians interact with one tool, administrators manage one vendor, and revenue integrity happens at the point of care rather than as a separate downstream process.

Question 16

What EHR systems does Cleo integrate with?

Accepted Answer

Cleo is designed to integrate with major EHR platforms including Epic, Cerner (Oracle Health), and Meditech, as well as other EHR vendors, on-call physician scheduling systems, and ADT. Specific integration capabilities vary by organization; contact Cleo to discuss your current EHR environment.

Question 17

How long does a typical Cleo implementation take?

Accepted Answer

Implementation timelines vary by organization size and the number of modules being deployed. Cleo is built for practical deployment speed. Most organizations are live with initial modules within days or weeks, not months. The onboarding process includes EHR integration setup, workflow configuration, and clinician training, all supported by the Cleo implementation team.

Question 18

Is Cleo Health HIPAA compliant?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Cleo Health is built for healthcare environments with HIPAA compliance as a foundational requirement. This includes data encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, audit logging, and Business Associate Agreement (BAA) execution with health system partners. For detailed security documentation, visit the Cleo Security page or contact the team directly.

Question 19

How does Cleo reduce our total number of AI vendors?

Accepted Answer

Most health systems today use separate point solutions for ambient documentation, charge capture, CDI, and care coordination, each with its own contract, security review, implementation, and training program. Cleo replaces all of them with a single unified platform and a single vendor relationship, reducing administrative overhead, consolidating costs, and eliminating the workflow fragmentation that comes from managing multiple tools.

Question 20

What security certifications does Cleo Health hold?

Accepted Answer

Cleo Health maintains industry-standard security certifications appropriate for healthcare AI platforms, including SOC 2 compliance and HIPAA-required safeguards. For the most current security posture documentation, visit the Cleo Security page or request information directly from the team.

Question 21

What is the Cleo Acute Care OS?

Accepted Answer

The Acute Care OS is Cleo's unified platform that covers the full inpatient workflow from admission through CDI. It includes four integrated modules: Patient Assignments (rules-based census management and on-call scheduling integration), Ambient Documentation (AI-generated clinical notes for hospital medicine and emergency medicine), Charge Capture (AI-assisted ICD-10 coding at the point of care), and Real-Time CDI (documentation specificity queries surfaced before discharge). These modules share a single data layer, meaning information flows automatically across the workflow without requiring manual re-entry.

Question 22

Can we implement only part of the Cleo platform?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Cleo modules can be deployed individually or in combination based on your organization's priorities. Many health systems start with ambient documentation or charge capture, the highest-visibility and fastest-ROI modules, and expand to real-time CDI and patient assignment management as adoption matures.

Question 23

Does Cleo generate discharge summaries and other supplemental documents?

Accepted Answer

Yes. In addition to encounter notes, Cleo automatically generates supplemental documents including cross-cover summaries, discharge instructions, ED handoff notes, and other transition-of-care documents, all tailored to the individual patient's case and created in seconds. This is particularly valuable for hospitalists managing large census panels and care coordinators managing patient throughput.

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