Primary care providers working mainly in small practices report decreased feelings of burnout and higher satisfaction with their practices when using an ambient AI scribe, a new report by Phyx Primary Care found.
For primary care providers that see 20 to 30 patients per day, ambient scribes are likely to keep more physicians in the profession by reducing the strain related to clinical documentation, Phyx found. The nonprofit focused on feedback about the new category of technology because doctors like hearing from doctors, they said.
Primary care physicians reported that when using an ambient scribe, their clinical notes were “more accurate” and “more detailed,” the report says.
Phyx, which conducts reports on innovations in primary care, surveyed 116 primary care physicians who worked across 37 care locations. About 80% of the providers worked in small and independent practices, though the survey also represents physicians from large practices and health systems.
Using their proprietary “Primary Care Vital Signs” survey, Phyx queried primary care providers on the effects of using the ambient documentation by Suki AI on their level of burnout, practice satisfaction, scheduled time for routine visits, adequacy of time for patient care and EHR time spent after hours.
“We realize that in our long history of working with physicians, that they need to hear from doctors like them,” Edmund Billings, CEO of Phyx, said in an interview. “So we wanted to understand how these products actually work in practice.”
Phyx said it chose to work with Suki because of its existing relationship with the organization – they’ve done two other studies together – and the primary care provider network they could easily tap into to survey. Billings also said Suki was a leading example in the category of ambient AI.
Among the primary care providers surveyed, 60% fewer reported feelings of burnout after using ambient scribing, and 81% more providers felt satisfied with their practice.
Phyx explained the results of the survey questions as a chain of downstream benefits.
First, Phyx presents that physicians reduced notetaking time by 41% when using Suki AI for ambient documentation. This reduced the providers’ documentation burden by 27%, Phyx found. Over half of clinicians reported that Suki improved their note quality “to a great extent.” Forty-four percent said the use of Suki for documentation improved their interactions with patients “to a great extent.”
Phyx found that the “relief of documentation burden improved the Primary Care Vital Sign score.” A fifth of providers said they could increase the time spent on patient care during the visit, as opposed to time working on documentation, and a third of providers spent less time working after hours, the survey found.
Phyx touts that the increased focus on patients and the reduction in documentation burden caused primary care providers to report significantly less burnout and higher levels of satisfaction with their practice.
“We started in 2017 to 2018,” Billings said. “The burden and burnout, you know, particularly the burnout that primary care family physicians were facing, was an epidemic, and it still is. It's actually not getting much better. And we said, 'This is urgent.'”
The burnout epidemic increased for primary care providers during the COVID-19 public health emergency, Billings explained. Phyx wanted to understand which technologies could decrease burnout and benefit providers.
The ambient AI survey is filled with testimonies from primary care doctors about their experience with the tool, both positive and negative. One physician said, “My documentation is more thorough, especially for more complicated histories, physical exam findings, and complex plans for specific patient problems.”
A “detractor” of the technology wrote in their survey that “AI can be helpful to certain people depending upon how much time is required to document a visit.”