Health system leaders continue to be surprised by ambient AI adoption trends, with clinicians using the scribes at higher-than-anticipated rates, especially as the tools improve.
At Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care, AI scribe adoption has eclipsed expectations, reaching 48% after executives expected 30% at this stage. The academic health system also recently surpassed 1 million ambient-enabled encounters.
“Exceeding the target tells us the value is clear to the clinicians it resonates with, even in a crowded and fatiguing digital environment,” Isil Arican, MD, executive director for clinical applications at Stanford Health Care and its AI scribe project lead, told Becker’s.
Stanford completed its ambulatory AI scribe rollout eight months ago, with use steadily growing ever since. Dr. Arican expects another big uptake in adoption with Stanford’s upcoming inpatient launch.
“We’ve learned that ambient scribes are not for everyone, and that’s OK,” she said. “Success does not mean universal adoption. What matters is depth of value. Clinicians who use ambient documentation tend to adopt it intentionally and stick with it because it meaningfully reduces cognitive and clerical burden in the exam room.”
Boston Children’s Hospital leaders have been taken aback by the robust adoption of ambient technology in the emergency department. More than 150 ED clinicians use the scribe on a monthly basis, reflecting one of the highest adoption rates in the organization.
“It’s now rare for our ED docs to not use ambient,” said Chase Parsons, DO, chief medical information officer of Boston Children’s. “It’s these areas, with high postshift documentation, where we’ve really seen the greatest benefit.”
On the outpatient side, a little more than half of Boston Children’s providers use ambient workflows after the pediatric health system broadly deployed them in October.
“This is an exceptional uptake of an optional tool,” Dr. Parsons said. “Notably, we did see some slower uptake over the winter months, but are again seeing a spike in clinicians’ use.”
At FMOL Health, a nine-hospital system based in Baton Rouge, La., ambient AI adoption has been expected and continues to grow, Senior Vice President and CIO Will Landry said. The nine-hospital system also recently incorporated diagnosis-aware notes, where patient problems are automatically pulled into the charting.
“We are expecting total usage and adoption rates to increase significantly over the next 12 to 24 months,” Mr. Landry said.
As the tools have improved, Boston Children’s specialty groups have increasingly embraced them, particularly as additional prompting capabilities better create specialized documentations for nuanced patient visits. Boston Children’s and Stanford also both experienced an increase in uptake after Android became fully integrated.
At Stanford, challenges have been “mostly structural rather than cultural,” with changes in ambient notification workflows delaying inpatient momentum and advanced capabilities, such as ambient orders, not yet delivering consistent value, Dr. Arican said.
Success, meanwhile, has been driven by a low-friction approach, Dr. Arican said, with the solution being automatically available to clinicians so they did not have to commit before experiencing it. It was also intuitive, easy to use right out of the box.
“These experiences reinforced a common industry lesson: Ambient AI adoption is less about excitement and more about reliability, fit and trust,” Dr. Arican said. “When any one of those wavers, clinicians disengage quickly.”
Demand has consistently outpaced the rollout plan at Stanford, which has to move several groups up in the schedule because of interest. If Dr. Arican could do it over, she said she would activate all physicians and advanced practice at once rather than taking a staged-access approach.
“In hindsight, adoption isn’t the hardest part, but learning how to use the tool well is,” she said.
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