Anna Qian, Contributing Illustrator

A new Yale-led study found that ambient artificial intelligence scribes, which document medical visits, significantly reduced physician burnout and increased focused attention on patients. 

Ambient AI scribes listen to and transcribe patient-clinician conversations, generating visit notes and completing required documentation. The study, published online last month, collected data from 263 physicians and advanced practice practitioners across six health care systems that utilized the Abridge ambient AI scribe.

“Across our multicenter study and our internal research at UChicago Medicine, we are seeing converging evidence that ambient AI scribes meaningfully reduce documentation burden and improve the day-to-day work experience for frontline clinicians,” Sachin Shah, the co-author of the study and the chief medical information officer at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, wrote to the News in a statement. 

“In the multicenter study, which included nearly 40% of clinicians from UChicago Medicine, burnout dropped from 51.9% to 38.8% after just 30 days of use, with substantial improvements in cognitive load and clinicians’ ability to give patients their full attention,” she wrote.

Kristine Olson, the study’s first author and a national thought leader on professional worklife wellbeing, emphasized that the study was driven by a desire to give physicians more time and energy for patient care.

Olson said that with physician shortages growing and physician attrition rising, health systems cannot hire more clinicians to manage escalating documentation demands. Reducing administrative burden, she said, has become increasingly critical. 

“It’s been written about many times of the administrative complexity and the administrative load, and it said that healthcare medicine is strangling in red tape and paperwork,” Olson said in an interview. 

AI capabilities advanced rapidly during the pandemic, Olson added, enabling tools that can reliably record patient-doctor conversations and convert them into standard medical notes. 

In turn, the team sought to test whether the technology could relieve the time pressure that keeps clinicians tethered to documentation instead of to their patients.

Tina Shah, the chief clinical officer at Abridge who also organized the use of Abridge in the six health care systems studied, said she first connected with Olson to explore ambient AI from a wellbeing perspective. 

In their work, the team looked at physicians and advanced practice providers in ambulatory spaces — healthcare facilities that do not offer overnight hospital stay — and identified common pain points to relieve in clinical practice. After 30 days of deploying AI scribes, clinicians rated burnout, cognitive load, number of patients attended and undivided attention to patients on a ten-point scale.

Notably, intervention with Abridge AI scribes reduced burnout by 74 percent. Secondary analyses also showed improvements in cognitive task load associated with writing the after-visit note and in a clinician’s ability to remain fully attentive to their patients. 

“So most certainly, that makes a more lovely time in the clinic with your patients doing what you really love to do, taking care of them. So that makes sense, that it would also reduce burnout,” Olson said. 

While the study didn’t measure patient satisfaction, Olson said the increased focus on patients could have potentially improved patient experiences in the clinic. 

A Chicago-specific companion study led by Sachin Shah reinforced the findings from the paper, revealing that AI scribes saved clinicians about an hour of time each day. 

For Olson, one of the keys towards achieving lower burnout rates and improved patient care is investment from organizations interested in solving the issue. 

She credits the chief medical informatics officers and digital optimization leaders at the six organizations who collaborated in the study to push forward the AI scribe initiative.

“It wasn’t the technology in search of a problem, it was really driven by pain points that we know we have, and so I wish that more AI companies would seek out input, especially from chief wellness officers and people who measure the pain points, to say, how can we use our our technology and our know how to solve problems that you have so that we can make a more human, centered, satisfying health care experience?” Olson said.

When asked about future directions for research, Vinh Nguyen, the chief medical information officer at Memorial Healthcare System, said that Memorial Care will continue investigating the impact of ambient AI scribes in healthcare. 

Nguyen said that potential areas of research include further exploring clinician burden and productivity and “how patients feel about clinicians’ use of ambient AI scribes during the visit and the ways in which it enhances the interaction.”

The paper was published in Jama Network Open early last month.