The health system said Feb. 19 it would start rolling out Ambience Healthcare’s generative AI platform to U.S. ambulatory providers at the end of February. The smartphone app records healthcare visits then drafts a clinical note that providers review and approve before it’s uploaded to the EHR.
“It’s important to try before you buy because everything looks good on paper,” Rohit Chandra, PhD, executive vice president and chief digital officer of Cleveland Clinic, told Becker’s. “We expect this to be transformative. So we wanted this to be a decision that we don’t just pick the first person who shows up or pick based on a PowerPoint.”
Cleveland Clinic underwent a live AI scribe pilot in 2024 with five solutions, each spanning about three to five months and involving 25 to 35 providers. The health system evaluated the products on their quality and capabilities and the companies on their aspirations, product road maps and how easy they were to work with.
“A company needs to have technology chops,” Dr. Chandra said. “You want the company to have passion for healthcare. Because this is not a technology play when all is said and done; this is a healthcare play. Then the third is culture and fit. Do we share our ambition of where we want to go on this journey together?”
Cleveland Clinic also looked at the tools’ integration with its Epic EHR, which he expects to level off over time industrywide.
The adoption of Ambience at Cleveland Clinic illustrates how generative AI is realizing its promise in healthcare, two-plus years after the launch of ChatGPT, Dr. Chandra said.
“The products, even today, are quite amazing and are only going to get better,” Dr. Chandra said. “Over time, we should be able to substantially reduce the documentation burden, enable providers to operate at top of license, improve their experience and satisfaction, improve the quality of the physician-patient interaction — and that is starting to happen today.”
Without getting into specifics, Dr. Chandra said AI scribes are “not cheap.” The return on investment is improving the quality of the roughly 30,000 patient encounters Cleveland Clinic does each day.
“This can relieve the provider and make sure that, if nothing else, they’re making eye contact with a patient, as opposed to the computer screen,” Dr. Chandra said. “They’re able to bring their full attention to the patient. You can’t put a dollar value on that, right?
“The second part is healthcare, as an industry, is under extreme stress because of physician burnout and an insane demand for our services. So anything you can do to save physicians time is, again, priceless.”
Primary care physicians spend an average of one to three hours a day on documentation, adding up to about 10 to 15 hours a week, Dr. Chandra noted.
“If we can bring in tools and technologies that can reduce that from 10 to five, five to two, two to eventually zero, again that’s priceless,” he said. “As technology evolves it will also hopefully get cheaper over time.”
Dr. Chandra hopes to eventually make the tool available to all of Cleveland Clinic’s providers. He called AI scribes’ widespread use in healthcare “inevitable” and “not that far off.”
“All the providers who have tried the product have given me nothing short of glowing reviews and feedback, and they can’t wait to get their hands on it,” Dr. Chandra said. “It doesn’t happen that often.”
