As the chief information officer at Reid Health, I’ve seen firsthand how administrative burdens are driving clinician burnout and straining healthcare systems. We knew AI for clinical documentation could help, but choosing the right platform required a thoughtful, step-by-step approach. Ultimately, we chose to implement Abridge, and I will explain why below.
My mission as CIO is not merely to introduce new technologies to our system; it’s to enable our clinicians to deliver better patient care, and to do it sustainably without the stress of non-clinical work that fuels burnout. At Reid, we say that we are “friends, family, and neighbors taking care of friends, family, and neighbors,” and that includes our clinicians.
Step 1: Identify the problem we needed to solve
Before exploring solutions, we aligned internally on challenges: documentation keeping clinicians late at work; rising burnout rates fueled by administrative burden; clinical efficiency with billing and coding; and distractions during patient-doctor visits.
“There were points in my career when I felt hopeless and overwhelmed at the amount of time I had to spend on clinical documentation,” Dr. Annuradha Bhandari, a family doctor at Reid, told me. “I wasn’t at the point of burnout, but I did ask myself how long the status quo would be sustainable.”
She was far from the only clinician who expressed this sentiment. Solving this critical issue became the focus of our goals: Reduce after-hours work; improve work-life balance for clinicians; and enable better patient engagement.
Be clear on the problems and the outcomes you hope to achieve. For us, the problems couldn’t be more apparent.
“I was incredibly frustrated because there was so much weight on my shoulders just trying to practice and take care of people,” Reid foot and ankle surgeon Dr. Alisha Jones told me. “I would take that work and frustration home to my family on the weekend, too.”
Step 2: Understand what AI can — and should — do
We focused on ambient AI — a technology designed to assist clinicians, not replace them. The goal wasn’t to automate the human connection in care, but to remove the distractions preventing it.
The technology needed to:
- Capture clinical documentation seamlessly during visits.
- Be easy to use, with minimal disruption to workflows.
- Enable clinicians to focus fully on their patients, not their screens.
- Give clinicians time back so they can unwind and recharge.
“I’m medical director for our group, and the truth is, our providers are struggling,” Dr. Daniel Wegg, one of our family practice physicians, told me before we adopted AI. “They were fundamentally burning out from doing their records at home, crashing into bed, and then doing it all over again the next day. There was no room for life at all.”
The real power of AI isn’t in replacing expertise; it’s in amplifying it. AI should let doctors be doctors again.
Step 3: Define the evaluation criteria
Once we understood what AI for clinical documentation could offer, we established the criteria for evaluating platforms and they fell within four major buckets.
The first was ease of use. Essentially, how quickly can clinicians start using it effectively? The second was impact on workflow, which is primarily about the quality and depth of EHR integration. The third was accuracy, which is probably the most important factor; we were keenly interested in how well the technology could handle complex medical terminology and diverse patient needs. The fourth was about support, basically how well the vendor would respond to our feedback, adapt to our needs, and continue developing the product with ongoing improvements.
We also prioritized solutions that demonstrated measurable outcomes — time saved, satisfaction improved and burnout reduced.
Step 4: Pilot and gather real-world feedback
We launched a pilot across several specialties, including primary care, cardiology, and emergency medicine. After careful consideration, we chose Abridge to pilot because we believed that its capabilities matched our needs and knew from many in-depth conversations with the success team that Abridge fully supported our exploration and deployment. During this phase, we carefully measured time savings, clinician satisfaction, and patient experience. We used scientifically validated surveys from before and after implementation.
We involved frontline clinicians throughout the process, listening to their experiences and concerns.
Step 5: Measure results and scale
The results of our pilot addressed the problems we needed to solve and, frankly, blew us all away:
- 86% reduction in note-taking time.
- 60% decrease in after-hours documentation.
- 87% faster patient communication turnaround.
- 460,000 minutes saved monthly.
Clinician feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
From Dr. Jones: “It was a game-changer. Within one patient, I was hands-down sold. I felt total relief. All my frustration was gone. I don’t go into my weekends angry anymore.”
From Dr. Bhandari: “There isn’t a single day when someone doesn’t find me in the hospital to tell me how much they love our AI and how it has helped them personally.”
From Dr. Wegg, who has been practicing since 1979 and had his own ways of doing things before AI: “Do you remember the first time you rode a bike? I do. The feeling it gave me was freedom. Climb on my bike, and I could get anywhere in a couple of minutes — anywhere I wanted to go. As soon as I had a bike, the world was my oyster. I had the same feeling when I commenced with AI for clinical documentation. I could let everything go and just fly. I could soar through a visit, reacting and interacting, and not continually trying to remember every detail and put them into little boxes. I could just let the visit flow. I used to spend all my time checking off little boxes, and I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m just having a conversation with a patient, and it’s wonderful.”
These results and feedback gave us the confidence to move beyond the pilot and scale the solution across our organization.
It’s worth mentioning here that the AI platform we chose exceeded our expectations in both how well it works, as well as how easy it is to use and how easy the vendor made it for us to scale across the organization — all specialties, care settings, workflows and languages. For instance, many of our patients speak a variety of South Asian dialects, and the platform we chose works seamlessly for all of them.
Step 6: Address misconceptions about AI
Throughout the process, we encountered concerns that AI might replace human input or add complexity. We found the opposite to be true. AI didn’t replace clinicians — it empowered them to work at the top of their license. The platform was intuitive, requiring minimal training for adoption.
Final thoughts: Choosing the right technology matters
At Reid Health, adopting AI for clinical documentation has been a game changer. It’s not just about efficiency; it’s about restoring the joy of medicine — clinicians reconnecting with patients and reclaiming time for themselves and their families.
If you’re evaluating AI for clinical documentation, focus on the human impact. The right platform will align with your mission, ease the burden on clinicians and improve the experience for patients.
