What is an AI Scribe?

Healthcare has always been one of the most fulfilling yet demanding fields. Long hours, staffing shortages and the after effects of the pandemic has created a health care crisis with almost half of physicians saying they are burned out and 4 in 5 saying they are overworked. Healthcare professionals are now turning to technology to eliminate some of their burden and there is no better place to start than in clinical documentation.

Documentation forms the basis of every healthcare service. Healthcare providers are trained to create proper documentation for every patient in order to ensure they are receiving the best possible care and to comply with laws like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Good documentation  protects the patient by ensuring that doctors and other medical professionals learn a patient’s history and can understand the context of the patient’s treatment. Documentation is also important for legal and billing purposes, allowing healthcare providers to avoid malpractice claims and patients to have an accurate record of their healthcare history. Unfortunately proper documentation, usually done by medical scribes, is both labor and time intensive. Medical scribes go through years of training in medicine and its terminology and shadow physicians during patient appointments so they can document information as it comes up.

Of course, this process is a very tedious one for both healthcare professionals and patients. The presence of another individual during a doctor’s appointment can be quite jarring and with medical scribe shortages, physicians often have to do the documentation themselves in addition to their other tasks. The introduction of AI medical scribes is helping to lighten this load considerably, allowing patients to have more quality face time with their physicians while freeing up healthcare providers to see more patients and make time for themselves.

AI medical scribes are tools that listen to and transcribe patient-doctor conversations to extract important information that should be added to the patient’s file. AI scribes are able to do the work of a medical scribe faster and more efficiently making them a good solution to the medical scribe shortage. With the use of AI, AI scribes are able to create comprehensive notes for every patient appointment using the transcribed text without storing the conversation or any other private information. These help the AI scribe to comply with privacy laws while still creating an exhaustive record for each visit. 

AI medical scribes are created using a combination of AI technologies and algorithms. Some of them are;

• Speech recognition: Speech recognition is the technology responsible for transcribing human speech to text. In the case of AI scribes, speech recognition helps to deliver accurate and high quality transcriptions with the use of acoustic models, language models, and Voice Activity Detection (VAD) which helps to identify speech segments within an audio signal.
• Natural Language Processing: NLP is the ability of a computer to identify, analyze and generate human speech. Some components of NLP that are useful for AI scribes are syntax and semantic analysis, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and sentiment analysis useful in interpreting the context and tone of a given text. NLP in general is important in speech-to-text transcription accuracy.
• Machine Learning: Machine learning uses data and algorithms to teach computers to learn without being directly programmed. By training them on large amounts of data, ML enables AI scribes to continuously improve themselves every time they are used. This is done using three types of ML; supervised learning where models are trained on labeled data and the outcome is known, unsupervised learning where models learn patterns from unlabeled data without set outcomes, and reinforcement learning where the model learns through trial and error.
• Deep Learning: Deep learning involves the use of neural networks to understand and generate human speech. For AI scribes, this is done through the use of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) which processes sequenced  data such as speech or text and transformers which are used to understand context. This is useful when handling complex language patterns.
• Audio Processing: This is used in enhancing audio quality and extracting data. It involves minimizing background noise, removing echo from recordings and improving the overall quality of the audio.
• Natural Language Generation: Natural language generation is the section of NLP that is responsible for generating text from structured data. This is particularly useful when creating summaries or reports from transcriptions like AI scribes do.

AI scribes can be used to automate one of the most time-consuming tasks in healthcare- documentation. With AI scribes, physicians and other healthcare professionals no longer need to dedicate time to providing documentation for every single patient, freeing them up for other more urgent tasks. This makes AI scribes particularly useful in healthcare where many professionals are overwhelmed and overworked. AI scribes successfully decrease the amount of time spent on each patient creating a more efficient working environment.

Patients also enjoy the benefits of including AI scribes into the healthcare system. Adding AI scribes into the room means one less human being ensuring that patients are left feeling comfortable with the ability to properly articulate their thoughts. Physicians are also able to interact better with patients instead of constantly writing notes and comments. This directly translates into better quality of care and subsequently better outcomes for both patients and physicians.

Healthcare professionals are notoriously overworked and understaffed. Integrating AI scribes into their work process means one less task to complete and can help decrease stress in physicians and other healthcare professionals. Easing this load on physicians can help prevent burnout and can lead to a better work-life balance. Physicians are then able to focus their full attention on caring for their patients and creating a suitable treatment plan for them.

The usefulness and efficiency of AI scribes can lower the operational cost of hospitals and other healthcare systems. By automating a big part of the workload, physicians are able to increase their productivity levels and the number of patients that they attend to every day. Introducing AI scribes also helps lower the cost of human error in transcribing and documentation while allowing timely and thorough documentation.

In 2022, Jersey Community Health, a network of 15 hospitals in Illinois was going through a staffing shortage. As a result of the pandemic and the subsequent burnout of healthcare professionals, staff at Jersey Community Health  were quitting their jobs or taking extended leave. After unsuccessful attempts to recruit new staff to tackle their administrative backlog, the network turned to AI to fill in the gap. Using AI scribe software, Jersey Community Health was able to cut countless hours of documentation each week and even increase their revenue. Physicians also quickly discovered that patients were more comfortable and were able to discuss sensitive issues. By the end of their trial period, providers found out that they were able to see 26% more patients while spending less time on administrative work.

This year, AI scribe tools were rolled out to 10,000 physicians in Northern California and adopted by over 3000 of them who used it for a trial period of 10 weeks. At the end of the trial period, physicians from different specialties including primary health physicians, psychiatrists and emergency doctors noted that they spent one less hour at the computer each day. According to Dr Lee, a primary care physician, the AI scribe was able to filter out pleasantries and banter to transcribe only notes necessary for her records. “This was the quickest spread of technology and quickest adoption of new technology in the medical group ever,” she said.

Advances in AI technologies bode well for the future of AI scribes. With more research and development, perfectly accurate real time transcription is possible. This could be a significant breakthrough from healthcare providers, offering them a way to access documentation instantly and with no additional work on their part. Some AI scribes are already customizable but with more development, we could have AI medical scribe systems that can adapt to various specialties, fit their documentation style to each discipline and even be tailored for individual patients. They could even be integrated into other existing AI medical tools, creating a system of autonomous AI for healthcare providers.

In the ever evolving world of AI, various tools are being developed everyday but AI scribes remain some of the most useful tools for medical professionals. The ability to transcribe documentation easily and efficiently is saving physicians and healthcare providers thousands of hours each year. By integrating AI scribes into their work process, physicians are able to make good use of their time while providing a more comfortable and interactive experience for patients. Most AI scribes are also able to fully comply with data and privacy laws like HIPAA ensuring that patients are guaranteed full confidentiality and privacy. All of these benefits means that AI medical scribes are one of the best tools that can be introduced in the healthcare field.