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We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com. Back to Healio As the presence of ambient AI scribes to record clinical encounters in the exam room grows increasingly common, experts continue to debate over whether this new technology will ultimately be a friend or foe to physicians. \u201cAmbient AI has the potential to bring about significant changes in what has become the elephant in the room for many physicians: the electronic health record,\u201d Leonard H. Calabrese, DO, chief medical editor of Healio Rheumatology, professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, and RJ Fasenmyer chair of clinical immunology at the Cleveland Clinic, said in an interview.
Image: Allan Gibofsky, MD, JD, MACR, FACP, FCLM
For example, ambient AI can listen to clinical encounters and minimize the time physicians spend on electronic health records, which experts have long cited as a source of bureaucracy-related burnout. However, whether those changes are immediate or universally positive remains to be seen, according to Kenneth G.\u00a0Saag, MD, MSc, professor of medicine in the division of clinical immunology and rheumatology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Kenneth G.\u00a0Saag \u201cAmbient AI has the potential to alleviate a pretty major challenge, which is that most of the clinical encounter is spent typing,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we have to consider whether the AI scribe is capturing salient details and weeding out the chatter.\u201d According to Saag, an ambient AI tool could, in a perfect world, do exactly that and potentially bring back the kinds of doctor-patient encounters he recalls from a generation ago. \u201cIt can allow us to look the patient in the eye and return to the interpersonal nature of a doctor visit,\u201d he said. \u201cThe hope is that it is not creating more work by requiring a lot of editing.\u201d For Allan Gibofsky, MD, JD, MACR, FACP, FCLM, professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, and attending rheumatologist and co-director of the Clinic for Inflammatory Arthritis and Biologic Therapy at the Hospital for Special Surgery, the risk for introducing errors into the medical record should be top of mind for any physician. \u201cAs with any new technology, we have to temper our enthusiasm for its utilization with caution of how it is going to be utilized,\u201d he said. \u201cFor example, what does it mean to use this tool without appropriate professional oversight? Medical records are eternal. If there is an error in a patient\u2019s chart, it gets carried forward and attempts to correct it are, at best, problematic. It is important that the same is not true for the documentation by AI scribes.\u201d Another potential concern is that employers may see the time-saving nature of these products and adjust employee expectations accordingly, said Grace C. Wright, MD, PhD, of Grace C. Wright MD PC. Grace C. Wright \u201cTime is money, and if AI allows you to see patients more efficiently in less time, the patient load may be increased,\u201d she told Healio. \u201cI would prefer to have more issues dealt with in the clinical encounters, such as mental health, life impact and social connectedness, instead of just adding more patients. Undoubtedly, our patients would become healthier if we could spend the extra time managing their overall health.\u201d Additional concerns over the use of ambient AI in the exam room involve potential threats to patient privacy, and the question of when and how to acquire patient consent to use such technologies. However, if these impediments can ever be overcome, the technology could fundamentally alter the way medicine is practiced, according to experts. \u2018Redesign the choreography\u2019 In a 2025 paper published in JAMA Network Open, Olson and colleagues surveyed 451 physicians who used an AI scribe in the clinic for 30 days to determine whether use of the technology saved them time and reduced burnout. Among the 272 physicians from multiple specialties who completed both the pre- and post-intervention surveys, results at 30 days showed that the proportion of respondents who reported experiencing burnout decreased significantly from 51.9% to 38.8% (OR = 0.26; 95% CI, 0.13-0.54). Further results showed that use of an ambient AI scribe was associated with significant improvements on a 10-point scale in burnout (mean difference, 0.47 points; standard error, 0.12), note-related cognitive task load (mean difference, 2.64 points; standard error, 0.13), ability to provide undivided attention (mean difference, 2.05 points; standard error, 0.18), patient understandability of their care plans from reading the notes (mean difference, 0.44 points; standard error, 0.17), and time spent documenting after hours (mean difference, 0.90 hours; standard error, 0.19). \u201cThis multicenter quality improvement study found that use of an ambient AI scribe platform was associated with a significant reduction in burnout, cognitive task load, and time spent documenting, as well as the perception that it could improve patient access to care and increase attention on patient concerns in an ambulatory environment,\u201d the researchers wrote. Although Calabrese said he is encouraged by such findings, he noted that simply having the tool is insufficient to reshape the clinical experience. Leonard H. Calabrese \u201cThis technology has the potential to redesign the choreography of the practitioner-patient dyad that has been with us for 20 years since we have been using the laptop and the EHR,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, I have strong doubts that everyone who starts using ambient AI will be on a trajectory to optimize their practitioner-patient interaction spontaneously just because there is a device recording your voices.\u201d According to Calabrese, there is a perception that younger physicians will be more adaptable to the new technology. However, he suggested that practitioners of all ages could experience some discomfort in the way<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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