When Jeannine Urban went in for a checkup in November, she had her doctor’s full attention.
Instead of typing on her computer keyboard during the exam, Urban’s primary care physician at the Penn Internal Medicine practice in Media, Pennsylvania, had an ambient artificial intelligence scribe take notes. At the end of the 30-minute visit, Urban’s doctor showed her the AI summary of the appointment, neatly organized into sections for her medical history, the physical exam findings, and an assessment and treatment plan for her rheumatoid arthritis and hot flashes, among other details.
The clinical note, which Urban could also review on the patient portal at home, was incredibly thorough, she said. It summarized all of her questions and concerns and the doctor’s responses. The scribe “made sure we didn’t miss anything,” Urban said.
Ambient AI scribes are being hailed by physicians as a game changer that helps free them to focus on their patients rather than their computer keyboard. By releasing doctors from the onerous and time-consuming task of documenting what happens during every patient encounter, early studies show, AI scribes may help reduce physician burnout and after-hours “pajama time” catching up on work in the evening.
The potential of AI to transform every aspect of the health care system — from patient care to clinical efficiency to medical innovation — is an area of intense focus, including by the Trump administration.
Last January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to remove barriers to American leadership in AI. Later in the year, a press release from the federal Department of Health and Human Services invited stakeholders to weigh in on how the department can accelerate the adoption of AI in health care.
Several startup vendors in recent years have introduced ambient AI scribe products that can be integrated into electronic health records. EHR market leader Epic is piloting its own AI scribe technology, which it expects to release widely early this year, according to Jackie Gerhart, a family medicine physician who is chief medical officer and vice president of clinical informatics at Epic.
Health tech experts estimate that a third of providers have access to ambient AI scribe technology. As adoption looks likely to grow rapidly over the next few years, many expect it to become more of a recruiting tool, a minimum requirement for incoming clinicians, who reports indicate are increasingly prioritizing work-life balance.
“It’s part of keeping doctors happy,” said Robert Wachter, a professor and the chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, whose forthcoming book, A Giant Leap, explores how AI is transforming health care. “Health systems that initially might have done a hard-nosed return-on-investment calculation — many are softening on that and realizing that the cost of recruiting and retaining doctors is pretty high.”
But many questions remain. Does the use of ambient AI scribes improve patient care and health outcomes? Will doctors use time they gain by employing an AI scribe to improve the quality of the time they spend with their patients or just boost the number of patients they see? To what extent will expanding the amount of detail available from a patient visit lead to bigger bills if the AI scribe is integrated with a coding app that optimizes provider charges?
For now, these questions remain mostly unanswered.
Urban said that the AI scribe didn’t change her experience as a patient very much. Typically, after a patient gives verbal permission, the AI scribe records the visit on a phone and organizes the conversation into the structure of a clinical note, filtering out small talk that isn’t pertinent to the medical visit but incorporating relevant details about a family member’s recent cancer diagnosis, for example. The scribe’s note is often then integrated into the provider’s EHR. The doctor later reviews the note and signs off on it.
Even though the visit may not feel very different to patients, some clinicians report that ambient AI scribes are changing patient encounters in unanticipated ways.
“Now, when I’m doing a physical exam, I have to say what I’m doing and what I’m finding out loud in order for the AI scribe to document it,” said Dina Capalongo, Urban’s primary care doctor. “People find that very interesting,” she said.
When Capalongo places her stethoscope over the carotid artery under a patient’s jaw, for example, she might say that she doesn’t hear a “bruit,” or vascular murmur, whose presence could indicate atherosclerosis. Patients have told her, “I never knew why a doctor would listen there,” she said.
Saying things out loud for the AI scribe that would typically appear only in a clinical note can create its own set of challenges, particularly during sensitive physical exams. Doctors may feel it’s important to adjust their conversation accordingly.
“Sometimes patients are anxious and scared and my saying things that they don’t understand or they may worry about during an uncomfortable examination does not help the situation and honestly is insensitive to what the patient is going through,” said Genevieve Melton-Meaux, a professor in the Division of Colon and Rectal Surgery at the University of Minnesota, who is also chief health informatics and AI officer at Fairview Health Services in Minneapolis. “I’ll keep that top of mind and make sure I record it” after the visit.
“How we have conversations with patients about these tools is really important, in particular for maintaining trust and ensuring accurate information,” Melton-Meaux said.
Studies have found that, across a range of measures such as completeness, timeliness, and coherence, the notes created by ambient AI scribes are generally at least as good as, and sometimes better than, traditional documentation, said Kevin Johnson, a pediatrician who is vice president for applied informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
An ongoing concern is around AI “hallucinations,” in which false, sometimes fabricated information appears in an AI output.
Kaiser Permanente, an early adopter of ambient AI scribe technology, provides it to more than 25,000 doctors, advanced practice providers, and pharmacists systemwide. It has found hallucinations to be “quite rare,” said Daniel Yang, an internist who is vice president of AI and emerging technologies at KP.
But they happen. An AI-scribe-generated note, for instance, might say that the doctor planned to refer someone to a neurologist or to follow up in two weeks. The problem? The doctor might not have said that.
“The technology is not perfect, and that’s why physicians are reviewing it,” Yang said. It’s learning from regular physician visits as it goes, he said. That’s why having a person check the work product is critical.
Still, even such a “human-in-the loop” system is fraught, Wachter said. “Humans stink at maintaining vigilance over time,” he said.
As the use of ambient AI scribes becomes routine, some clinicians worry that the technology will widen the divide between health care haves and have-nots.
Large health systems are able to move forward with the technology, Melton-Meaux said. But what about critical access hospitals or small private practices? “There need to be more resources,” she said.
Physicians’ enthusiasm for ambient AI scribes stands in sharp contrast to their negative reaction to electronic health record systems that have become widely adopted in recent years to replace paper charts.
“During the last 10 years, when EHRs became a thing, we all became very grumpy, overworked data scribes,” Wachter said.
The introduction of AI scribes makes physicians feel like technology is working for them rather than the other way around, health care AI experts said.
And AI scribes are “training wheels” for more consequential adoption of AI in health care, Wachter said.
To improve health care value and save costs, Wachter said, we need a system that makes it more likely that physicians will practice evidence-based medicine to order the right tests and prescribe the right medications.
“It’s a few years away, but it’s all AI-dependent,” he said.
Epic has introduced roughly 60 AI use cases for patients, clinicians, and administration, with over 100 more in the works.
“It’s so much bigger than a scribe,” said Epic’s Gerhart. “It’s literally listening and acting in a way that tees things up for me so that I can take action.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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