Over the past couple years, tech experts and hospital leaders alike have been signing the praises of AI scribes. These tools — which ambiently listen to patient-provider interactions and provide a transcript capturing the dialogue — are being adopted by hospitals all across the country, with many of these organizations scaling their deployments across their enterprise.
AI-powered scribes are demonstrating their ability to alleviate clinician burnout, but their financial impact is unclear, according to a report released recently by the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI).
PHTI is a nonprofit that conducts research assessing the clinical and economic impact of digital health tools. This latest report is based on interviews with health system leaders and other industry experts, including executives from CommonSpirit Health, Intermountain Health, Mass General Brigham, Providence and Ochsner Health.
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The report showed that ambient scribes are helping to reduce physicians’ documentation burden, as these tools automatically generate clinical notes for the EHR. Many organizations said that the tools give clinicians back precious hours each day that they used to spend manually catching up on clinical documentation.
“Ambient documentation has proven to be one of the most effective and impactful methods for enhancing the provider experience. As these technologies continue to evolve and incorporate new features, we remain committed to rigorously evaluating their safety and effectiveness to ensure they consistently serve as game changers for clinicians,” said Adam Landman, chief information officer at Mass General Brigham.
However, health system leaders also noted that there isn’t much evidence regarding AI scribes’ financial impact.
Some health system leaders reported an increase in the number of patient encounters as a result of using ambient scribes, but most didn’t.
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“Health systems need to be clear about what they hope these tools will achieve in terms of overall performance and efficiency, and they need to measure the results,” said Caroline Pearson, executive director of PHTI.
Some of these leaders said they think clinicians may be more willing to accommodate additional patient visits as their documentation burden continues to shrink. In other words, some hospital leaders have faith that cost savings could be realized over time as adoption and deployment processes improve.
Scott Arnold, CIO and chief of innovation at Tampa General Hospital, said to MedCity News in an interview last month that hospitals don’t typically track metrics like staff attrition rates or physicians’ overall job satisfaction in order to calculate an AI tool’s ROI. But to him, these can be real indicators of a solution’s impact.
“Sure, there may not be a direct ROI figure that I can deliver up to the CFO, but I can point over to the attrition rate and how that’s gone into single digits because people are happy and they got a little time back at night. Now they’re not spending their night, you know, hand jamming notes into a system when we have AI tools to do it for them,” Arnold explained.
This is especially important as most physician specialties currently face shortages, the report noted.
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