AI scribes have freed physicians from having to type all throughout patient visits, but there’s still a lot of progress that needs to be made on the pile of administrative chores clinicians face once the patient leaves the room.
Ascension is working to solve that issue by extending AI beyond note-taking and into the tasks that become a headache once the visit ends, like order entry and billing, according to Thomas Aloia, the health system’s chief clinical officer.
Ambient listening and AI-powered scribing has done a great job of offloading the note-taking burden from physicians, but after the patient leaves, they still have to review the AI-generated note for accuracy, place orders, and in some cases help with billing. Aloia thinks the next leap forward is AI that can anticipate those tasks in real time — so that tools can sense when an order needs to be placed and prompt the physician to confirm it on the spot, rather than after the fact.
“We do see a time point where we have a fully automated task with audit backup,” Aloia said of billing and coding.
He noted that Ascension physicians “are not expert billers; they’re expert doctors,” which is part of why the health system is watching several vendors develop tools that can code and bill a note automatically.
Compliance will always come first, Aloia stated, but he is also realistic about the limits of manual processing.
“There’s a certain amount of human error in coding and billing,” Aloia said, adding that AI paired with a strong audit mechanism could ultimately outperform humans in terms of both accuracy and consistency.
Timeliness plays into that too. Aloia pointed out that the longer a note sits before it’s finalized, the more a physician’s memory of the visit fades, which he said reinforces the need for a real-time system with a built-in audit trail.
But physicians aren’t the only clinicians benefiting from AI-driven documentation tools at Ascension. On the inpatient side, the health system has rolled out AI summarization to help nurses prepare handoff reports for the next shift — a task that has traditionally taken up to an hour and a half. Aloia said AI now generates a summary of a patient’s recent history in a matter of minutes.
Aloia noted it’s one of several ways Ascension is using AI not just to save time, but to reduce the kind of variability that’s long been baked into manual processes.
To him, both examples underscore a goal that most health systems are focused on right now: using AI to give time back to clinicians so they can focus on patient care instead of paperwork. As he put it, it’s about “physician satisfaction, creating joy in work, returning to vocation.”
Photo: iodrakon, Getty Images
