AI scribes make clinicians happy, but don’t save them a lot of time

Mario Aguilar covers technology in health care, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wearable devices, telehealth, and digital therapeutics. His stories explore how tech is changing the practice of health care and the business and policy challenges to realizing tech’s promise. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

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.

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