The use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a scribe to alleviate physicians’ notetaking load was linked with greater efficiency, a decreased mental burden, and an improved sense of engagement with patients.
For the report, Phyx Primary Care, a non-profit innovation lab dedicated to improving the primary care experience, surveyed 116 primary care providers across 37 locations across the country —a mix of small independent practices, primary care organizations, and large health systems—who used the AI tool, Suki AI Assistant, which listens passively to a patient visit and generates a visit summary for the physician to review, for more than 30 days.
“Primary care is based on deep physician-patient relationships that require time and attention. Primary care physicians often describe their practice as being ‘on a hamster wheel’; always running, feeling rushed, and never catching up,” wrote the report authors. “To survive financially under Fee for Service (FFS), family physicians must often see as many as 20 to 30 patients a day. To see this many patients, typical visit lengths are < 20-minute visits. This time constraint leads to burdens associated with documenting and coding the visit optimally, which can take up to half of that visit time and much of the physician’s focus.”
Many physicians resort to working after hours to complete necessary documentation and coding, which the report team emphasizes as a root cause behind physician burnout and professional dissatisfaction.
Based on the survey results, it appears leveraging an AI assistant tool may be a solution. Here are the key findings from physicians who used the ambient AI assistant:
- Documenting time was reduced by 41 percent
- Feelings of burnout decreased by 60 percent
- Satisfaction rates increased by 81 percent
- Working after-hours decreased by 37 percent
- Satisfaction with after-hour work increased by 46 percent
- Documentation burden decreased by 27 percent
- Note quality improved with a score of 3.3 out of 4.0
- Forty-four percent said the tool improved the patient interaction by a “great extent”
“Is it a “Gamechanger” for the primary care experience? These results do solidly show an Ambient AI Assistant transforms the nature of the patient visit and its documentation,” wrote the researchers. “Documentation shifts from being a burdensome task to being a direct output of the actual visit. It's virtuous. The richer the patient interaction, the richer the clinical note, and the better the primary care experience.”