At Atrium Health, based in Charlotte, N.C., the use of AI-powered clinical documentation tools is showing potential in reducing physician burnout and streamlining workflows.
A study by Atrium Health, published on Sept. 6 in JAMA Network Open, evaluated the impact of Nuance's Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Copilot, an AI tool that listens to patient-clinician interactions and converts them into draft clinical notes.
The nonrandomized clinical trial included 112 clinicians from outpatient clinics in North Carolina and Georgia who were trained and used the AI tool, while 117 clinicians who did not use AI served as the control group. The intervention group received a one-hour, in-person training before activating the AI platform.
A survey was conducted before and five weeks after the AI tool's implementation to assess its impact on the clinicians' time spent using electronic health records, frustration levels and overall documentation experience. According to the findings, 47.1% of the clinicians using the AI tool reported a significant reduction in time spent on EHR tasks at home, compared to just 14.5% in the control group.
Additionally, 44.7% of clinicians in the intervention group said they experienced less frustration with EHR use, a substantial improvement over the 14.5% in the control group who reported the same.
The AI-powered tool also helped decrease the time clinicians spent on documentation after patient visits, with 43.5% of the intervention group reporting improvements compared to just 18.2% of the control group. According to the study, these findings suggest that AI tools could help ease the administrative burdens that often contribute to clinician burnout.
However, the benefits were not universal. A notable share of clinicians, both in the intervention and control groups, reported no significant changes in their experience. About 44.7% of participants in the intervention group and 68.7% in the control group said their EHR experiences remained the same before and after the trial.