As health systems implement ambient AI for clinical documentation at an accelerating pace, one group long used to waiting its turn is actually being prioritized.
Children’s hospitals make up just 1 in 20 nationally but deliver a disproportionate share of complex care. Encounters are often lively, layered and nonlinear. Clinicians must diagnose patients who may not have the words to describe symptoms, all while working to communicate with parents who are juggling the audible needs of siblings in the room. Healthcare technologies designed for use in adult care often struggle to keep up.
Shakeeb Akhter has worked across both adult and pediatric care settings. Now, as Chief Digital and Information Officer of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), he distills the difference into a five-word adage: Children are not little adults. “But the technology industry has historically treated it that way,” he said, noting the large portion of healthcare AI built for adults that people expect to fit pediatric needs.
The verdict? “It just doesn’t,” Mr. Akhter said.
A turning point may be underway. Becker’s spoke with clinical and innovation leaders at eight leading U.S. children’s hospitals — Akron Children’s, Boston Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Children’s Hospital Colorado, Dayton Children’s, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Seattle Children’s and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh — to understand what happens when care teams are provided with ambient AI technology that meets pediatric care where it is.
Rapid adoption driven by strong fit
For years, pediatric hospitals relied on dictation and voice recognition tools with mixed results.
“It required a lot of work for people to use them,” said Zafar Chaudry, MD, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Seattle Children’s.
That history has made clinical and innovation leaders at children’s hospitals particularly attuned to the most basic and crucial measure of any technology’s worth: adoption.
At Seattle Children’s, physicians are piloting Abridge, an ambient AI platform used by more than 150 health systems in the U.S., including Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic and Duke Health. Dr. Chaudry has already noticed the difference in uptake versus other technologies — an unfamiliar experience, given how much healthcare technology is initially developed for adult medicine.
“Out of the box, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it,” Dr. Chaudry said.
At Boston Children’s, adoption has been driven by technology that is thoughtfully built for setting, specialty and workflow.
“It’s not just about reducing the burden of documentation — it’s about making that change in a way that fits into the clinical workflow,” said Chief Innovation Officer John Brownstein, PhD.
Boston Children’s recently became an enterprise collaborator with Abridge. The decision was informed by clinician feedback across specialties that the technology intuitively improved the quality of interactions among care teams, families and patients. “That kind of usability is critical in pediatrics, where visits are dynamic and time is always at a premium,” said Dr. Brownstein.
At Akron Children’s, which has scaled Abridge to over 400 clinicians across 22 specialties, CIO Harun Rashid shares a similar observation: “I have never seen a technology that is so simple in the way it was deployed. That really stood out — how quickly, literally in less than 15 minutes, a clinician is able to use the product.”
Early enthusiasm has translated to results: Akron Children’s clinicians report an 84% reduction in documentation effort, a 90% increase in undivided attention during patient visits, and 95% user retention.
“We need unified systems that work together to assist in care, reduce physician burden, reduce inefficiencies and waste, and also create greater efficiency in how we process things and improve quality,” said Mr. Rashid.
At UPMC Children’s, over 250 clinicians use Abridge across 26 specialties, supporting more than 25,000 patient visits in 2025 (through April). Momentum is just as important as adoption, according to CMIO Srinivasan Suresh, MD.
“What’s been surprising is how rapidly clinicians have embraced the technology — even those who are typically hesitant with new digital tools,” said Dr. Suresh, who reported that Abridge reduced his own documentation time by 60 to 90 minutes each day following eight-hour emergency department shifts. “This speaks to how well Abridge has tailored its ambient AI to real-world pediatric workflows.”
AI designed for pediatrics, by pediatricians
Adoption is being driven by how well Abridge captures the intricacies of pediatric visits. Ask pediatric leaders what sets their care apart from adult medicine when it comes to ambient AI, and they list the differences with pride: singing, siblings, body language, playing pretend, family dynamics, storytelling, laughter and meltdowns.
In these situations, the clarity of clinical notes becomes even more important. CHOP is currently piloting Abridge, and Mr. Akhter sees potential in its ability to generate clinical notes that are, in his words, “much more friendly to read from a patient standpoint.” Notes that are easier for parents to understand can help families better process complex care decisions and feel more connected to the clinical team.
Dana Schinasi, MD, CMIO at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, knows these dynamics well. She has practiced pediatric emergency medicine there for nearly 15 years. When her hospital began its Abridge pilot, she was curious about the platform’s capability to capture visits dense with information.
“In pediatrics — developmental context, family dynamics, everything around preventative care — there’s so much subtlety, and capturing that is vital,” said Dr. Schinasi. “There is so much in terms of rapport-building through playful interaction during a serious visit.”
That “playful interaction” could easily be mistaken for important clinical context by AI technology not attuned to details of pediatric care. At Children’s Colorado, CMIO Patrick Guffey, MD, designed a simulation to test Abridge’s capabilities on this score for himself. He played a rambling, distracted parent in a chaotic exam room who was anxious to get outside and smoke a cigarette. His colleague posed as the child. Abridge ran in the background.
“It captured all of the clinical data perfectly,” Dr. Guffey said, noting the system even picked up on the child’s exposure to secondhand smoke. “It filtered out all the other conversations. It’s really kind of fascinating how that works.”
Abridge recently enhanced its pediatric offerings to cater to this chaos and the structured documentation required to come out of it. In May, it introduced a pediatric well visit note type.
The note type automatically detects if a well visit is occurring, then organizes information in the documentation accordingly. True to name, well visits don’t revolve around acute illness or symptoms in the pediatric world. They’re preventive, focused on patient growth, development, immunizations and anticipatory guidance for age-specific issues.
“I don’t know the last time I went to my well check and they asked me how my job is going and am I performing at my peak level,” said Sarah Rush, MD, CMIO of Akron Children’s. “But those are things we think about in pediatrics. We’re often asking about how school performance is going, how children are sleeping, what social dynamics we need to be thinking about and intervening on to keep them healthy in addition to all the regular sick visit care that we deliver.”
For CIOs like J.D. Whitlock of Dayton Children’s, the key to understanding these important details was in Abridge’s development process, which included pediatricians at the company working in collaboration with peers at health system partners. “If you’re building solutions for healthcare, and you’re big enough to have a handful of physicians on staff, then by all means make sure you have a pediatrician on staff,” he said.
From exam-room wins to systemwide impact
The eight hospitals represented in this story collectively conduct more than 6 million pediatric patient visits a year. Volume drives urgency for technologies that scale to solve today’s problems and create tomorrow’s value.
At UPMC Children’s, Dr. Suresh said he and his team are seeing early operational benefits of Abridge, particularly with improved documentation completeness and accuracy.
“Anecdotally, we are seeing fewer documentation gaps that previously contributed to billing inefficiencies or downstream clarifications,” he said. “From a systems standpoint, the availability of both audio and structured transcripts also opens new doors for quality improvement, peer coaching, and even research on communication in pediatric care,” he added.
Similar trendlines are emerging at Akron Children’s, where Mr. Rashid noted clinicians’ early reports of improved billing with Abridge technology. He can’t help but think about the potential of this, particularly amid headwinds like prior authorizations and delayed reimbursements. “I think Abridge has the ability to help clinicians [with] these things,” he said. “This will also help us reduce the back office workload and, over time, will help with denials and coding.”
At Boston Children’s, Dr. Brownstein highlighted potential beyond the exam room. “One area that stands out is the enhancement of research on patient-provider communication,” he said, noting that the detailed transcripts and recordings offer valuable insights for improving care quality and training. On the operational side, he sees Abridge showing early promise in managing prior authorizations and reducing denials thanks to increased thoroughness and accuracy in documentation.
Then there’s care coordination — an entire category of healthcare that has often been said to break down not from lack of concern, but from lack of a shared map. At CHOP, Mr. Akhter is already thinking about how ambient AI technology like that from Abridge could be an important step toward meeting broader coordination needs. “Can you expand it for clinical care or longitudinal care planning?” he asked. He envisions a scenario in which the AI-generated note, combined with structured EHR data, could draft an initial care plan that can be reviewed by care management teams.
Such systems-level value is precious for pediatric institutions, which tend to be smaller and less-resourced than their more diversified peers.
“We’re a small system,” Mr. Whitlock said of Dayton Children’s. “We don’t have massive research teams. But Abridge made it possible for us to bring leading-edge technology to our clinicians without a heavy lift. That matters.”
Also highly valued by pediatric technology leaders: Abridge’s versatility in meeting care teams where they are. Abridge has capabilities designed for inpatient care, emergency departments, and has also collaborated with Mayo Clinic and Epic on a documentation platform designed specifically for nurses.
“That’s really important to us,” said Dr. Schinasi at Lurie Children’s. “If we have the opportunity to deploy a single [technology] that supports all of our clinicians, I think that makes for a more seamless patient clinician experience as well.”
Heather Nelson, CIO of Boston Children’s Hospital, is pleased to see breadth from Abridge paired with continued depth in collaboration.
“The ability to expand the use cases across the care continuum and care teams is exciting,” she said. “And, having a ‘seat at the table’ with Abridge to provide input on pediatric content — it can be complex, but it is important. Boston Children’s has a voice, and we have our care teams and clinical leaders who are excited to collaborate as well.”
This is the direction Abridge is moving in: building on its traction with a multi-product platform — pairing breadth with depth. After closing a $300 million Series E round in June, the company is expanding capabilities across note types, data capture and revenue cycle operations. Already live in beta at sites: deeper specialization for emergency medicine, behavioral health and more.
By developing a platform with high adoption, Abridge is delivering a cascade of additional benefits to pediatric hospitals — operational, financial and experiential. This isn’t just helpful; it’s imperative. In 2024, children’s hospitals saw average operating margins hit a 10-year low. Such pressure leaves them eager for investments — like Abridge — that address critical challenges while returning new forms of value across the enterprise.
For children’s hospitals, leaders see a future colored by their first impressions of Abridge — one shaped not just by technical performance, but by rare attentiveness to the messy, nonlinear, deeply human parts of pediatric care, designed by pediatricians in partnership with pediatric care centers.
“This has just been a real game-changer for our providers,” said Dr. Rush at Akron Children’s. “There hasn’t been much that we’ve rolled out that has had this much enthusiasm and just general positivity around it. I think that’s really been just so amazing to watch and to continue to ride the wave [and] expand upon this to let pediatricians get back to bringing joy to the visit.”
Editor’s note: Boston Children’s Hospital is an investor in Abridge.
