Ambient AI and Doctors

A study published in JAMA Network Open found that nearly half of clinicians using an ambient AI clinical documentation tool reported positive outcomes.

The tool, Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Copilot from health IT vendor Nuance, leverages automatic speech recognition and natural language processing to draft electronic health record (EHR) documentation based on patient-provider conversations.

The nonrandomized clinical trial included family medicine, internal medicine, and general pediatrics clinicians from outpatient clinics in North Carolina and Georgia within Atrium Health. Those who participated received an hour of training on the AI tool.

Researchers compared the intervention group with a control group, which included clinicians encouraged to participate as controls by service line leaders and those who initially expressed interest in the AI tool but chose not to proceed after informational sessions.

A seven-question survey was sent to 230 participants before and five weeks after implementing the AI tool to evaluate its impact on their EHR experience.

The study showed that 47.1% of clinicians using the AI tool reported spending less time on EHR documentation at home, compared to 14.5% in the control group. Additionally, 43.5% of the AI tool users spent less time on clinical documentation post-visit, compared to 18.2% of the control group. Moreover, 44.7% of the intervention group reported reduced frustration with the EHR, compared to 14.5% of controls.

However, around 44.7% of the intervention group and 68.7% of the control group indicated their EHR experiences remained similar before and after the AI tool implementation.

The researchers acknowledged potential selection and recall biases as study limitations and called for further research to identify areas for improvement and explore the impact across different clinician groups and health systems.