Ambient AI is Fast Becoming the Clinician’s Favorite Tool

The technology acts as a medical scribe, listening to the doctor-patient encounter and transcribing the interaction for the medical record. The finished product is available shortly after the encounter, enabling clinicians to quickly review and edit the information before it’s populated in the EHR.

The attraction for healthcare executives is threefold. Ambient AI is designed to target three pain points:

• Improve patient care by personalizing care management;
• Boost operational efficiency by improving documentation and care coordination; and
• Improve data extraction by pulling relevant information from the EHR (and, potentially, other sources) to improve patient care and identify cost savings.

Ambient AI is “probably one of the fastest growing products that we have witnessed in terms of how quickly physicians are taking to it and adopting it,” Harjinder Sandhu CTO at Microsoft’s Health and Life Sciences Platforms and Solutions,” said in a HealthLeaders interview this past February in advance of the ViVE conference in Los Angeles. “It is starting to make an enormous difference in how physicians view their work and their work-life balance.”

Healthcare executives say the tool aims to remove the barrier of technology between patient and doctor, by taking the pressure off of clinicians to document the patient encounter and enabling them to talk and interact with the patient.

“We believe that ambient listening … is a reliable, affordable, and scalable solution which we can use to help alleviate the burden of documentation to our wide group of over 4,000 providers across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas,” Jason Hill, Ochsner Health’s innovation officer, said in an e-mail to HealthLeaders.

“There are multiple steps of quality analysis which exist within Deepscribe as well as internally that we have done and continue to perform to ensure that our documentation is of the highest quality and reflective of the patient and provider conversation,” Hill added. “We feel that the capability to access the audio transcripts of the patient/provider interviews provides a superior source of truth vs. the current process, which puts the burden on the provider to remember all of the information that they were required to document.”

“Our physicians strive to make every interaction with patients matter and work to establish a good rapport with our members so they know they are understood and heard,” he said in a press release, noting the tool isn’t used without the patient’s consent. “Creating space for the patient and the physician connection is what inspired us to implement this technology. And we hope that those connections and improved efficiencies will help with the sustainability of the practice of medicine for many doctors.”

Stanford Medicine partnered with Microsoft’s Nuance Communications to launch a DAX Copilot ambient AI app this past spring, following a pilot program at Stanford Health Care.

“This could have a transformative impact on the way we provide clinical care,” Niraj Sehgal, MD, CMO at Stanford Health Care, said in a new story published by the health system. AI tools will never replace the clinician, but it might replace parts of their workflow,” Sehgal said.

That could eventually include AI tools that not only capture the conversation, but suggest diagnoses and appropriate treatments.

“As people get more comfortable using AI-powered technology, it creates a fertile ground to continue adapting other tools for the workplace that support providers, freeing them to better care for patients,” Sehgal said.