Ambient AI helps recruit physicians who are eager to use the technology, a leader with New Orleans-based Ochsner Health told Becker’s.
“If one primary care group has ambient listening, and another primary care group does not, if I’m a primary care doctor looking to figure out where I’m going to go, I probably will go to an ambient group, if I’m a young, just out of residency,” said Jason Hill, MD, innovation officer at Ochsner Health.
Recruitment is part of what Dr. Hill called the “soft ROI” for ambient AI, which transcribes medical visits before drafting clinical notes for the EHR. The 46-hospital system recently adopted the technology from DeepScribe, rolling it out to 500 providers. The company was the right fit because it offered a codevelopment approach, Dr. Hill said.
He called ambient the “Cinderella story” of healthcare AI.
“Ambient listening is so desired by providers that most health systems are really implementing it without a clear financial ROI,” Dr. Hill said.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t short- and long-term benefits, he said. Documentation capture helps drive revenue, particularly when it comes to coding for Medicare Advantage plans.
Softer ROI includes reducing cognitive burden for providers, which in theory makes them more productive, he said. Physicians can see more patients; surgeons can do more procedures.
Dr. Hill said retention and recruitment fall into the long-term “soft ROI” category. “The data on burnout, very, very closely ties with employee retention, and particularly provider retention,” he said. “So clinician retention is a big deal, especially in a looming physician shortage.” He said health systems without ambient AI risk losing providers to those that have it.
Long-term “hard ROI” includes gathering intelligence that can be used for contracting with payers and other providers, he said. “So now I know what all my docs are talking about, what the documentation levels are, and we can aggregate those up at a system level based on a really solid source of truth, and then be able to learn a lot of that stuff when you’re negotiating a contract,” he said.
