Ochsner Health and Kaiser Permanente recently integrated this technology to document patient contacts and prepare them for the electronic health record.

Healthcare organizations are increasingly using ambient AI as a means of silently and unobtrusively recording doctor-patient conversations.

Ochsner Health recently announced a partnership with Deepscribe to bring its Ambient Clinical Documentation tool on the Epic EHR platform to physicians across the health system’s 46 hospitals and 370 community and urgent care centers. And Kaiser Permanente announced a deal with Abridge to bring a similar AI tool to physicians across 40 hospitals and more than 600 locations in eight states and Washington DC.

(Read also: AI moves from the drawing board into the doctor’s toolbox.)

The technology acts as a medical scribe, listening to the doctor-patient encounter and transcribing the interaction for the medical record. The finished product is available shortly after the encounter, allowing doctors to quickly review and edit the information before it is entered into the electronic medical record.

Ambient AI is attractive to healthcare leaders for three reasons. Ambient AI targets three pain points:

• Improve patient care by personalizing care management;
• Increase operational efficiency through better documentation and coordination of treatments.
• Improve data extraction by retrieving relevant information from the EHR (and possibly other sources) to improve patient care and identify cost savings.

Ambient AI is “probably one of the fastest-growing products we’ve ever seen in terms of how quickly physicians are adopting and adopting it,” said Harjinder Sandhu, CTO at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences Platforms and Solutions, in a HealthLeaders interview last February ahead of the ViVE conference in Los Angeles. “It’s starting to make a tremendous difference in how physicians look at their work and their work-life balance.”

Healthcare executives say the tool aims to eliminate the technological barrier between patient and doctor by removing the pressure on doctors to document the patient encounter and allowing them to talk and interact with the patient.

“We believe Ambient Listening … is a reliable, affordable and scalable solution that will help us reduce documentation burdens for our large group of over 4,000 providers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas,” said Jason Hill, Ochsner Health’s innovation officer, in an email to Health Guide.

“There are several steps of quality analysis that are performed both at Deepscribe and internally, and that we continue to perform, to ensure that our documentation is of the highest quality and reflects the conversation between patient and provider,” Hill added. “We believe that the ability to access the audio transcripts of patient/provider interviews provides a better source of truth than the current process of requiring the provider to memorize all of the information they were required to document.”

Ramin Davidoff, MD, The chief medical officer and chairman of the board of Southern California Permanente Medical Group said Kaiser Permanente has been working with Abridge over the past year to integrate the new tool into physicians’ workflows.

“Our physicians strive to make every interaction with patients matter and work to build rapport with our members so they know they are understood and heard,” he said in a press release, noting that the tool is not used without the patient’s consent. “Creating space for patient-physician connection is what inspired us to implement this technology. And we hope that these connections and improved efficiency will help make many physicians’ medical practices sustainable.”

Stanford Medicine partnered with Microsoft’s Nuance Communications last spring to launch a DAX Copilot ambient AI app following a pilot program at Stanford Health Care.

“This could have a transformative impact on the way we deliver clinical care,” said Niraj Sehgal, MD, CMO at Stanford Health Care, in a new paper published by the health system. AI tools will never replace the clinician, but they could replace parts of their workflow,” Sehgal said.

This could ultimately include AI tools that not only record conversations but also suggest diagnoses and appropriate treatments.

“As people become more comfortable with AI-powered technology, it creates fertile ground for further adaptation of other tools in the workplace that support providers and free them to better care for patients,” Sehgal said.