How Ambient AI Technology is Revolutionizing Healthcare for Patients and Providers
Clinical Electronic Health Records (EHR) have become increasingly demanding for physicians and are a major driver of burnout and dissatisfaction. Time dedicated to paperwork during patient encounters can also affect the patient-physician relationship by hindering effective care.
Ambient artificial intelligence (AI), such as AI medical scribing, has great potential to reduce documentation burden, enhance physician-patient communication, and expand clinicians’ capabilities. How? This article takes an in-depth look into:
- How ambient AI is helping clinicians better serve patients
- Real-world use cases of artificial intelligence tools from an industry leader
- Choosing the right AI solutions for your practice
- The future of AI within healthcare
What is Ambient AI?
We’ve heard of healthcare systems integrating new AI-driven technologies to help foster the provider-patient connection. But what does this mean? And what is ambient AI? Ambient artificial intelligence is an application of AI techniques created to help healthcare practices in different ways, including relieving them of significant administrative burdens.
The software uses generative AI to detect, listen to, and record a conversation between the patient and physician, translate it into a transcript, and restructure the transcription into a physician’s note. This action makes notes easy to read after the visit and saves providers significant time with little to no after-hours charting.
The bottom line is that ambient AI opens many possibilities to providers. Next, we discuss how this technology can positively impact today’s healthcare.
How Ambient AI Can Enhance Healthcare
Integrating ambient AI into healthcare holds great promise for improving disease diagnosis, patient-provider communication, and practice management. For example, AI-powered wearables and contactless sensors help providers monitor patients remotely. This clinical technology can identify patients at risk and provide round-the-clock care. AI also helps automate manual tasks, improving practice efficiency. Some integrated EHR software uses this clinical technology to send patients custom text reminders before scheduled appointments.
AI also assists in other healthcare areas, including improving medical education, such as AI-powered cameras used to evaluate surgical performance. So, what specific benefits can providers expect from this healthcare technology? Below, we list the top advantages.
Saves Time and Reduces Burnout
Providers want to engage and connect therapeutically with patients. Unfortunately, most are overworked and burned out, leaving little time to foster those relationships. A report revealed that in 2023, 48.2% of physicians reported experiencing at least one symptom of burnout.
AI is taking the lead in improving provider workloads to combat this issue. One initiative, [RAISE Health](https://med.stanford.edu/raisehealth0, used ambient voice recognition technology to help reduce burnout. The project revealed that 78% of clinicians reported the technology expedited clinical notetaking, and about two-thirds reported saving time. One study reveals implementing ambient AI can lead to a time reduction of around 26.3% in clinical consultations.
Decreases Errors and “Note Bloat”
Let’s face it: handwriting and manually entering patient post-visit notes comes with the risk of human error. Excessive chart information, or “note bloat,” may also create confusion, leading to potential problems. An advantage of ambient AI in clinical documentation is its ability to ensure accuracy in the quality of medical notes. This clarity makes for more reliable records and reduces human errors. DeepScribe uses ambient AI technology to tackle these common practice issues, allowing providers to focus on the personalized care of their patients.
DeepScribe’s Customizable AI Tools
The team at DeepScribe believes that if they can relieve clinicians of the burden of medical documentation, clinicians will be more energized to provide amazing care. To achieve this, DeepScribe uses advanced AI technology to generate accurate, complete, and compliant notes that are seamlessly exported into a practice’s EHR, creating benefits including:
- Mitigating burnout: Automatically generates real-time clinical notes after each patient encounter – reducing both documentation time by up to 75% and average chart closure time to as fast as 1.6 minutes.
- Improving accuracy: Increases note-taking precision, requiring minimal review for clinicians.
- Creating personalization: The tool transforms patient conversations into fully customizable chart notes and allows clinicians to fine-tune notes to match practice workflows and improve adoption.
- Saving money: Live scribes can have their place within a practice, but it comes with a cost. Live scribes can miss work. And when there is turnover, they need to be retrained. Ambient scribing from a financial perspective is both substantially more cost-effective, a small fraction of the cost per user.
We recently interviewed Dr. Dean Dalili, Chief Medical Officer at DeepScribe to learn how AI is helping clinicians better serve their patients on our podcast, On the Health Record. When asked how physicians feel about their technology, Dr. Dalili explains, “Providers are often amazed at how AI can, after listening to a relatively unstructured story, restructure that information in a coherent and comprehensive way.”
He adds, “Our key differentiator is the ability to really accommodate specialty workflows and also to drive high levels of customization per user, and that requires a little bit of effort at the front to make sure that the settings are all fine-tuned to your specialty workflow and your documentation preferences. But once that’s in place, you can use the solution for the duration of your career.”
The DeepScribe and DrChrono Partnership
DrChrono by EverHealth and DeepScribe developed a partnership so practices using DrChrono EHR can use AI to automate medical notetaking from appointments and integrate it into the EHR. During the podcast, Dr. Dalili shares how this partnership has saved time, improved productivity, and reduced burnout for practices. He also highlights how this collaboration accommodates clinical workflows in a way that most ambient AI technology has not yet created.
He reveals, “A significant percentage of the healthcare workforce requires a product that will accommodate their clinical workflow and how they think about patients, speak to patients, document their patients, and what’s relevant to them. And so, we accommodate those specialties in their workflow. We don’t see a lot of this in other competitors- in terms of giving the level of prioritization.” He also adds, “We also deliver an EHR integration that enables that workflow to be reflected in the note. And so that’s where partnerships like ours make a big difference in our ability to service providers at a deep level.”
Risks Associated with AI
Ambient AI intelligence can significantly enhance practice management. Still, the potential security and privacy issues of this healthcare technology can’t be ignored. How do companies like DeepScribe ensure patent safety? Dr. Dalili explains, “The first element of security that we provide is we let all of our providers know that most states require two-party consent before you can record a conversation. The second is to realize that what we’re recording is really protected health information (PHI) and that capturing that information, storing it, or transmitting it back to the EHR through our secure data links and integrations requires the highest level of safety we can provide. Our data is end-to-end encrypted, and we currently store medical information in accordance with HIPAA laws.”
He also adds, “We realize that we are walking into the room with a clinician and a patient at a time our society widely recognizes as a moment of sacred trust and that we need to technically and functionally live up to the responsibility of being great stewards of that trust. And we do that both in how our product is built and how the data is maintained securely.”
How to Choose the Right AI Tools for Your Practice
With all this new knowledge surrounding ambient AI and its benefits, what’s next? Below, we offer practical tips and ideas on what to look for when choosing the right AI tools for your practice. The AMA and AHIMA suggest when looking for AI tools, healthcare providers and systems should consider:
- Practice needs: Recruit team members to discuss the organization’s needs and demo different solutions to see what works best for your practice.
- Patient communication: Will the tools improve patient communication by doing tasks such as providing personalized automated reminders or fine-tuning AI-generated exam notes to match practice workflows?
- Ease of use and training: See if the AI tool is highly intuitive. Ask about the personnel and technology infrastructure required for a smooth implementation and how easily the solution integrates with existing EHRs and other technologies.
- Accuracy: Ask the vendor for information showing that the tool has high accuracy rates, saves time, and requires minimal review.
- Privacy and security: See if the solution already has the proper security, encryption, and authentication measures in place to protect sensitive health information.
Looking Ahead: The Future of AI in Healthcare
When discussing the future of AI, Dr. Dalili states, “I think we’re in the early innings of what we can do here. The first thing we need to do is to prove to providers that we are trustworthy regarding the security of the data and the accuracy of the notes we write. Because I think the number one thing from a professional integrity perspective is that we’re producing a work product they can stand behind. The second thing is to show users that the customization and workflow capabilities we’ve embedded into the product are usable across a broad spectrum of their careers.”
He concludes by stating, “The third one is that we can successfully take the data from that organization or individual and try to repurpose it to improve the quality of the care they deliver and document. He adds, “We’re trying to be laser-focused on where we think we can add a lot of value. Where we can say to our users and partners that as a result of using DeepScribe, providers are taking better care of patients than they would have without using it.”
To learn more about DeepScribe and our integration visit our Partnership page.