Why hospitals are expanding AI scribes, even if they don't reduce costs
Over the past few years, technologists and hospital leaders have signed up for the compliments of AI scribes. These tools (which all echo the interactions of patient providers and provide transcripts of capturing conversations) are being adopted by hospitals across the country, with many of which are expanding their deployments in enterprises.
According to a recent report released by the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI), AI-driven scribes demonstrated their ability to alleviate clinician burnout, but the financial impact is unclear.
PHTI is a nonprofit organization that conducts research to assess the clinical and economic impact of digital health tools. The report is based on interviews with health system leaders and other industry experts, including executives at Commonspirit Health, Intermountain Health, Mass Brigham, Providence and Ochsner Health.
The report shows that environmental scribes are helping to reduce the burden on doctors’ documentation, as these tools automatically generate clinical annotations for EHR. Many organizations say these tools bring valuable time to clinicians every day to catch up with clinical documentation manually.
“Environmental documentation has proven to be one of the most effective and impactful ways to enhance the provider experience. As these technologies continue to evolve and incorporate new features, we remain committed to rigorously assessing their safety and effectiveness to ensure they consistently serve as clinicians’ game rules,” said Adam Landman, Chief Information Officer of Mass Mass Mass Brigham. ”
But health system leaders also pointed out that there is not much evidence about the financial impact of AI scribes.
Some health system leaders reported an increase in the number of patient encounters due to the use of environmental scribes, but most did not.
“Health systems need to be clear about what they want these tools to achieve in terms of overall performance and efficiency, and they need to measure results,” said Caroline Pearson, executive director of PHTI.
Some of these leaders say they think clinicians may be more willing to accommodate more patients as their documentation burden continues to shrink. In other words, some hospital leaders believe that as adoption and deployment processes improve, cost savings can be achieved over time.
Scott Arnold, CIO and innovation director at Tampa General Hospital, said Medcity News In an interview last month, hospitals generally do not track metrics such as employee turnover or doctors’ overall job satisfaction to calculate the ROI of AI tools. But for him, these could be real indicators of the impact of the solution.
“Of course, there may be no direct ROI figures that can be delivered to the CFO, but I can point out the churn rate and how it becomes a unit because people are happy and they are back for a while at night.
This is especially important, the report notes, as most doctors are currently facing shortages.
Photos: Anthem, Getty Images
