Trial Finds Ambient AI Notetaking Reduces Healthcare Practitioner Burnout
A trial conducted by UW School of Medicine and Public Health researchers found that “ambient AI notetaking, which involves an AI tool that passively listens to a doctor-patient visit and drafts a summary, can help reduce healthcare practitioner burnout by reducing time spent documenting clinical notes.”
Ambient AI can “securely draft notes during a patient visit, freeing up the provider to interact with the patient directly and reducing documentation time. AI-generated notes are reviewed by the healthcare professional for quality and accuracy.” The first article in the study established a framework for “designing, monitoring, and evaluating ambient AI technology within routine care.” This resulted in an open-source guide, now available to other health systems to “test the safety and effectiveness of Abridge, the ambient AI technology used by UW Health, in their own workplaces.”
The second article showed that “the use of the ambient AI scribe system correlated with a clinically meaningful reduction in burnout scores. The technology also reduced documentation time by 30 minutes per day per provider, improved the accuracy of the notes for diagnosis billing, and improved other secondary measures on well-being, like task load.”
About 800 physicians and advanced practice providers use the technology. A data dashboard “allows continued monitoring of how ambient AI is performing in clinical operations.”
