Main image courtesy of Tom’s Guide.

No matter what type of healthcare setting you work in—office, clinic, hospital—you know how important it is to take detailed notes of sessions with your patients. Typically clinicians take notes by hand or by entering them into a computer or tablet, in order to keep an accurate record of their patient visits. We all know this is key to maintaining records of vital (and sensitive) health information. This can be a time-consuming process for physicians, not to mention it can increase the amount of hours they work and contribute to additional stress and burnout.

Luckily, artificial intelligence has made its way into the healthcare sphere to help alleviate this task thanks to the implementation of ambient AI scribes. But how can these AI scribes help your organization? Glad you asked, because today we’re covering:

• What an ambient AI scribe is
• How this type of AI works
• The benefits of using an AI medical scribe

What is ambient scribing? 

The basics behind why you might want an ambient AI scribe

Ambient AI scribing is a newer technology that is making its way quickly into the medical world. No matter what your speciality is, if you’re a clinician chances are you’re taking notes about your patients’ visits. This could be for a routine check up, if they’re having a specific problem, or if you’re a part of their ongoing treatment team. You want to make sure you’re listening as best you can, while also documenting what they’re saying for their medical health record. While a lot of physicians have been able to do both at the same time, or by entering in SOAP notes after the visit, there is a better way to do this.

ambient AI scribes are applications that doctors can add to their smartphones or tablets that can transcribe the interaction between the doctor and patient. One of the most important aspects of this is that the transcription is not recorded, which means your patients’ health data is not stored in the application. This avoids another possible doorway for a breach by cyber criminals. The application then uses the transcription to create a note that documents the visit. With consistent use, the ambient AI continues to learn how you like to structure your notes, and can create templates that make it easier to fill in parts of your notes. After the visit, you can easily send the information to the patient’s EHR after a review.

There are all kinds of ambient AI applications out there and you can choose the one that works best for your practice. Some of the top options include:

• Playback Health
• Dax Copilot/Nuance
• Tali AI
• Epic

Why entering accurate notes is essential

You may be wondering how an ambient AI system can enter better notes than a clinician. While it’s true the transcriptions will still need to be reviewed by a human for accuracy, you may be surprised at how easy it is for AI to help with this administrative task. Entering accurate notes is a crucial part of the job, it ensures that you can track the progress of a patient, as well as share any information with additional providers. A lot of clinicians choose to enter their notes at the end of the day, and depending on how many patients they’ve seen, this could take some time. Having an AI system help with this process ensures:

• Patient details are recorded. AI can record conversations that take place during the visit and put the information into a SOAP format. This ensures that not only are their essentials transcribed, but why they’re visiting, any diagnosis, treatment options, and medication they’re prescribed.
• Progress and plans are tracked. Accurate SOAP notes ensure that patient progress is tracked, and that clinicians can see what has been prescribed in the past. They can determine whether a specific treatment or medication has helped the patient improve, or if something else should be attempted.
• Provides reference points. A doctor sees a wide variety of patients during the day, and it can be difficult to keep track of everything. Having good notes gives them the chance to review them before seeing the patient, to ensure they’re up to speed on what’s been going on since the last visit.

How do AI scribes work?

AI scribes can do all of this work seamlessly because they are programmed with speech recognition and natural language processing algorithms. Using these tools allows scribes to listen and transcribe information in real time so that there is a record of the entire conversation during the patient visit. This information can then be put into a SOAP format (or other note taking format) and the patient’s EHR will be updated. This process eliminates the need for a physician to physically enter the information after (or during) the visit.

The more that the scribe is used, the more it will learn and adapt to how you conduct your patient sessions and your note-taking preferences. It will learn to extract important information and place it in the correct location of the note.

Will AI replace medical scribes? 

Medical scribes are still a very helpful part of the doctor/patient experience, especially in high volume areas like the emergency room. These people are tasked with accompanying the clinician in order to record information into the patient’s EHR in real time. This ensures accurate and timely recording of the documentation, and allows the physician to spend time focusing on the patient’s needs. Medical scribes will continue to be used due to the high volume of clinical documentation, but AI scribes can help in this situation too. These ambient AI applications will only get better with time, and medical scribes can embrace using them to handle the mundane tasks of inputting data or updating the actual EHR record.

However, lots of clinicians still see the benefit of having a medical scribe accompany them (especially in the ER) because there is such a high volume of patients and the information must be recorded accurately and timely. 

How much does an AI medical scribe cost?

There are healthcare operations of all sizes that can benefit from an AI medical scribe, whether you’re an office with just a few providers, or you’re a large hospital. As we mentioned, you can research into a variety of AI providers out there to see which would benefit your particular situation the most. There are AI scribes made for smaller operations that won’t need to have as much recorded, and then there are applications that can be added to EHR systems for large campuses. The cost will vary accordingly, and you’ll want to reach out to your AI scribe provider for specific cost information.

There are a few things to consider when looking at any ambient AI application:

• Ensure that it is HIPAA-compliant (ideally SOC 2 compliant)
• Check to make sure that it will easily integrate with your current EHR system 
• All patient data that is transcribed should never be recorded or stored on the application once it is in the patient’s EHR
• It can be adapted to your specialty
• Data is encrypted

Requesting a trial is a great way to see if one specific ambient AI system is better than another one.

What is ambient medical documentation? 

In what ways can you use AI for medical records?

Ambient AI scribes are helpful in many ways and can easily be incorporated into patients’ medical documentation and seamlessly shared with your records management system. The main draw of using an ambient AI technology is that it can actively listen in real time to conversations had with patients, then use that information to help create accurate notes for the patient’s file. These applications can also help providers:

• With dictation. Some clinicians like to add to their SOAP notes after the visit or as they’re reviewing what the scribe put into the document. They can turn on the dictation function and add whatever additional nuances they want without having to type anything in. 
• Searching. Lots of applications also offer search functions for physicians who want to pull up something specific, either while they’re consulting with a patient, or reviewing a note afterwards. The AI can scan all the latest medical research to find exactly what they need.
• Automating patient journeys. AI scribes can also help with medical documentation by automating the patient journey. This means that it can streamline registration and post visit, as well as sending scheduling reminders or follow up requests.

How does an AI scribe do this?

AI scribes use their natural language processing algorithms and speech recognition software to adhere to the five C’s of medical record documentation:

• Clarity 
• Completeness
• Conciseness
• Confidentiality 
• Chronological order

The application follows the formatting of your EHR system to ensure that it’s producing high quality documentation.

Benefits of using an AI Medical Scribe

There are some compelling reasons to use an ambient AI scribe

The technology is not there yet to completely replace a medical scribe, nor can the AI scribe produce notes and medical documentation that don’t need to be reviewed, but it is a great help to clinicians in all kinds of fields. Ensuring that patients receive the best possible care is the goal of all providers, and employing an ambient AI application can benefit you in many ways.

• Reduces administrative burden. A lot of clinicians find themselves overloaded with the administrative task of entering accurate notes and medical documentation into patient files. Sometimes this cannot happen right after an appointment on a busy day, so it gets postponed until the end of the day. This means working extra hours, and can quickly lead to burnout. Employing an AI scribe frees up providers to no longer worry about getting all the documentation in, so they can have more free time throughout the day, or spend more time with patients.

• Improves doctor/patient relationship. You want to really be there when your patients are discussing their situation, but when you’re writing notes down, it can be distracting. You want to ensure you’re getting all the facts, but at what cost? Having the scribe listen while you have a conversation is a great way to ensure you can really be present for patients, and improve overall trust and relationships.

• Better accuracy. Sometimes accuracy is lost due to tiredness, divided attention, or not correctly remembering what occurred. Ambient AI scribes can eliminate the human error factor.

• Can help physicians in a variety of ways with their notes. Not only do AI scribes listen and transcribe encounters, but they can also be used for dictation, searching, formatting, and automating the patient journey.

• Can be shared easily. When all the patient’s notes are stored in the EHR, it means that it is easily shareable. If another provider needs to get up to date, or if an insurance company needs more information, all the documentation is right there.

Are you ready for an ambient AI scribe?

AI scribes could be a great addition to your organization. If your practice is ready to reap the benefits of having an AI scribe help with administrative overload, then consider checking out an ambient AI application from Playback Health. We offer an AI system that does it all, no matter what your speciality is.