With a promise to reduce burden on overworked doctors, ambient scribes that automate the process of writing clinical notes have become the vanguard use case for generative artificial intelligence in health care. The technology has garnered more than $1 billion in investment this year alone, and hundreds of health systems have already adopted these tools.
But as those customers have studied the impact of the tech, two discordant findings have consistently resurfaced in peer-reviewed pilot studies: Clinicians love the tools, but they also don’t seem to save much time.
Now a pair of recent publications of randomized, controlled trials of AI scribes offer the strongest evidence yet that the technology is having a positive impact on clinician’s well-being and workload. At the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers found that doctors using tech from scribe vendor Nabla saved about 23 seconds per visit, compared to the control group, while users of DAX, from Microsoft-owned Nuance, saved 5 seconds — a non-statistically-significant result. At the University of Wisconsin, clinicians using Abridge’s documentation software shaved off about 22 minutes of documentation time per day and saw a statistically significant reduction in a measure of work exhaustion compared to those not using the tool. The UCLA study found evidence that the tools were decreasing drivers of burnout regardless of whether they were saving time. Both academic medical centers have expanded their use of scribes.
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