Beyond ambient documentation: What's next for AI scribes

The future of generative AI (GenAI) in healthcare is promising: the technology can enhance care while improving physician and patient satisfaction. AI-powered solutions are a prime example of GenAI used to lessen administrative burden and help clinicians focus on what matters most: patient care.

During a January Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Suki AI, Josh Margulies, vice president for strategic customer engagements at Suki AI, moderated a discussion with Bryon Frost, MD, chief medical informatics officer at McLeod Health (Florence, S.C.), and Marijka Grey, MD, system vice president, transformation and innovation, CommonSpirit Health (Chicago). They discuss how AI scribes are evolving to become AI assistants and key factors for AI scribes' successful adoption and deployment.

Three key takeaways were:

  1. AI scribes address the number one cause of provider burnout: clinical documentation. Over the past 18 months, organizations that have implemented AI scribes have observed significant reductions in "pajama time" — the time that many clinicians are forced to spend working after hours to catch up with their organization's documentation requirements. The time savings — 40% of which is attributable to reduced notetaking — have improved clinician and patient satisfaction and boosted return on investment.

    "AI scribes have all three prongs of the stool: helping clinicians, helping patients and even helping the health system and its bean counters," Mr. Margulies said.

  2. Because other sources of clinician burnout remain, organizations need more advanced technology to address them. Those sources of burnout include inbox management, order generation and chart review, all of which can be automated.

    "Our belief is that it's not AI scribes we should be talking about, but AI assistants," Mr. Margulies said, emphasizing assistants' more versatile and nuanced nature. AI assistants can draft patient summaries, facilitate order staging, triage inbox messages, assign CPT codes, generate referral letters and even create bills.

    Beyond making workflow-related tasks more efficient, AI assistants can also serve as a point-of-care knowledge base, surfacing any key information that enables clinicians to be better and more efficient at their jobs.

    "I practice emergency medicine, where you'll see [multiple patients with vastly different conditions] and today you've got to keep all of that knowledge in your head," Dr. Frost said. "I didn't realize what a burden that was until I was able to offload that to a digital assistant."

  3. When shopping for an AI solution, organizations need a rigorous vetting process. Because AI assistants are a nascent technology, providers must evaluate any vendor offering similarly to how they would evaluate an EHR. "The challenge with the burgeoning and mushrooming of this technology is that there is so much vaporware out there," Dr. Grey said. Her recommendations for vetting AI assistant offerings include:

    • Request a live demo, so you can get a better feel for the product.
    • Ask whether the product is live or still in development. If live, try to find out who some customers are, including potential users in your own network. If still in development, ask about the product's roadmap and timeline.
    • Include your organization's end users in vetting the product.


"None of these technologies are cheap in the long run, so make sure that when you get something, it's something that everybody can stand behind," Dr. Grey said.

Watch the full webinar here.

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