AI tools aren’t free, and proving they’re worth the cost has been a sticking point for healthcare providers weighing whether to scale them across their organizations.
Cleveland Clinic is on its way to proving that math out. The health system onboarded more than 4,000 ambulatory care clinicians onto Ambience Healthcare’s ambient scribing platform in just four months — which has proved to be worth the money, according to a paper published this month in npj Health Systems.
The research found that 60% of Cleveland Clinic’s clinicians who used the AI scribe agreed it increased their likelihood of remaining in practice. This is a key data point — and a crucial metric for hospitals to focus on when it comes to their clinical AI deployments, given they spend millions per year on recruitment and retention efforts amid an ongoing workforce crisis.
The paper also reported 97% clinician satisfaction and 70% encounter-level utilization among established users one year after Cleveland Clinic’s rollout.
That is a stark departure from the large tech projects in the past. Many physicians still hold onto unpleasant memories from the dawn of the EHR era, in which the new technology was overwhelming viewed as more headache than help, noted Eric Boose, Cleveland Clinic’s associate chief medical information officer.
One of the reasons that the Ambience rollout was different was because the health system framed it as a gift rather than mandate, Boose pointed out. Clinicians weren’t required to see more patients or take on additional work in exchange for access to the tool — it was simply theirs to use if they wanted to try it out.
Getting clinicians up and running quickly was just as important as getting buy-in, Boose said. Cleveland Clinic offered live virtual training sessions three times a day so that clinicians could complete onboarding whenever their schedules allowed. They also added an on-demand training option for those, like surgeons, who couldn’t make a live session work.
Once physicians tried the tool on one or two patients, most were quickly convinced, Boose declared.
“Everybody has some healthy skepticism, as they should, about using a new tool in the patient care space,” he said. “But once they used it, I think we were all a little bit floored — like, wow, this really can be very helpful and save us a lot of time.”
Boose noted that type of early hands-on experience will always be more effective than any top-down messaging.
Quantifying the technology’s return on investment took more work.
Some of it was straightforward. Ambience’s platform also generates coding and billing suggestions, which helps ensure clinicians are reimbursed for the full scope of the care they delivered— which is a feature Boose said helped offset the cost of adopting the tool.
But the rest of the ROI picture was softer and more difficult to assign a dollar figure to. Cleveland Clinic surveyed clinicians directly to track measures like burnout and how much time the tool was saving them outside of their scheduled working hours.
Several clinicians told the health system they planned to continue working full time or delay retirement because of the tool, according to Boose. To him, that retention signal carries real financial weight for a health system that would otherwise have to recruit and train replacements.
This type of response to ambient AI has spread well beyond Cleveland Clinic, Boose added. As AI scribes become more widely adopted, he said they will likely evolve from a differentiator into something physicians expect their employer to offer.
Photo: MoMo Productions, Getty Images
