Feature

How ambient AI fixed the EHR's patient experience problems

Healthcare has advanced beyond the EHR's patient experience issues with ambient AI, which eases documentation burden and lets providers focus on the patient, experts say.

Sara Heath
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Published: 11 Aug 2025

It wasn't so long ago that healthcare providers debated how they could prevent onerous EHR documentation tasks from getting in the way of the patient experience. But now, with the insurgence of AI technology and ambient scribing, healthcare leaders think the industry could be on the precipice of a totally human-centered experience.

That's almost a paradoxical thought. Can layering in yet another health technology really bring providers closer to their patients?

But as experts continue to examine how AI is affecting the patient experience, the answer to that is a resounding yes.

"Our caregivers have never been hungrier for connection with their patients," Chrissy Daniels, the chief experience officer at Press Ganey, said in an interview. "No one is in healthcare by accident. Providers got into healthcare because they want to transform people's lives. The thing that has taken the focus or the energy away from patients has been a lot of these mundane tasks."

"Mundane tasks," such as EHR documentation, are often cited as the cause of clinician burnout. In 2022, an athenahealth survey found that excessive EHR documentation requirements are what's driving clinician burnout. That tale is as old as time, as providers have lamented the tools since they became popular back in the days of meaningful use requirements.

But it's not just the provider user who's begrudged the EHR. Patients, too, have taken umbrage with their providers being glued to a screen during clinical encounters.

It was a necessary evil, most agreed, as providers needed to manage documentation burdens at the point of care. Even still, pulling the provider -- and their eye contact -- away from the patient served as a detriment to a humanized patient experience.

Medical scribes proved useful for ameliorating both of those problems. The scribes, often medical students or folks looking for health industry experience, would sit in on clinic visits and document on behalf of the provider. As early as 2018, researchers deemed scribes a key resource for solving the provider burden and patient experience quandary.

But scribes require manpower, and that's one resource healthcare hasn't seemed to be able to make more of.

In comes AI.

AI powers voice recognition, ambient documentation

AI has revolutionized the medical scribing game by taking the human element, and therefore the staffing problem, out of the equation. Using voice recognition technology, these tools listen in during a clinical encounter, recording the patient-provider interaction and then summarizing and documenting.

These tools first gained traction in 2020 with the launch of Nuance's Dragon Ambient eXperience. Although it did take a bit for these tools to become ubiquitous, AI's boom in the past two years has made ambient scribing technology sophisticated enough for most organizations to trust and adopt it.

Today, ambient scribes are well-regarded as crucial to reducing providers' cognitive burden. And with that lower provider workload comes a better patient experience.

"The core of a great patient experience or a great healthcare experience in general is that connection between the patient and provider," Trevor Berceau, R&D director at Epic Systems, said in an interview. "As we look at the aspects of AI, as well as anything we do across any of our products, a lot of it is geared toward, 'how do we optimize that human connection between a patient and the provider they're talking with?' Ambient has done a ton to help on that front."

Part of that is because the provider doesn't have the physical computer sitting as a barrier between them and the patient. Eye contact is important for forging a connection between patients and providers, and it enables a more empathic patient experience.

But it's more than just the eye contact, both Daniels and Berceau said. Because providers no longer need to actively document at the point of care, they can focus on the whole patient encounter.

Ambient scribing drives a patient-centered connection

There are few tools more groundbreaking than ambient scribes, Daniels argued.

"Is there anything more powerful than being able to remove that mundane task from the lion's share of the work?" she queried with a nod to how AI takes some work off providers' plates.

According to Berceau, there's something just different about clinics that leverage AI charting, a term Epic uses in place of ambient listening due to what the company says is the active nature of its system.

"The atmosphere is different when a provider's talking face-to-face with the patient and not worried about typing everything into the computer or remembering it to type later," he noted, recalling an experience with WellSpan Health's chief digital and chief information officer, Hal Baker.

"Not only was it the face-to-face connection with the patient, but it was also the unburdening of that mental checklist that he had going in the background the whole time, and we hear the same thing from patients."

This is truly what drives an authentic, humanized patient experience, Berceau and Daniels both suggested.

And the proof is in the pudding. A May 2025 report in JAMA Network Open showed that ambient scribing decreased providers' cognitive loads, which the study authors said helped providers connect more deeply with patients and feel more job satisfaction.

Ambient scribing makes a deeper case for open clinical notes

Daniels cautioned against viewing the technology as a panacea.

"The reality is, it's the first experience they've had with ambient scribing," she explained. "When it works well, it's very, very good. But we know that there are patients whose health history was scribed accurately, that the ambient scribe missed it."

That can be an anxiety-inducing experience, considering the lengths patients usually must go to get their medical record amended or corrected.

"The challenge will be how we learn with the ambient scribe and how we address when things are missed," Daniels stated.

"And that's not, if it happens, it's when it happens," she stressed. "I mean, it will happen. And so, what is our protocol and how are we engaging our patients in that technology adoption?"

Engaging patients through this process is going to be varied, Daniels noted, because technical processes like requesting a medical records correction are informed by different organizational policies.

But, overall, healthcare organizations should continue to push patient portal adoption so patients can check and interact with their medical data. Practices like open clinical notes, which is mandated under the 21st Century Cures Act, will also be critical, Daniels noted.

The folks at Epic, naturally, are more confident, instead stressing the desire for providers to make changes to an ambient note.

"Overall, we hear the quality of the ambient mode is very, very good," according to Sean Bina, Epic's VP of Access and Patient Experience. "What we hear more about is that a physician may want to make updates to that ambient note, adding either additional color to something that was talked about that wasn't just directly clinically addressed, but the physician wants the patient to know about it," Bina said in an interview.

Epic's ambient scribing tool lets clinicians change the style of a note, put it into bullets or even change the language depending on patient health literacy level.

Do AI, ambient tools round out the care team?

Ultimately, AI has accomplished what healthcare largely has not in the past few years -- it has created a solution to a mounting workforce crisis.

It's no secret that scribes, even the human ones employed by the health industry for years, have been effective. These medical professionals have unburdened providers of their clinical documentation duties, effectively cutting down on provider burnout and improving the healthcare experience.

But human scribes are expensive, and like other clinical professions, there's been a manpower problem.

"If healthcare had money, we would've all hired human scribes years ago," Daniels remarked.

AI creates a fix for that.

"It brings value, and it increases the connection that caregivers and patients both want," Daniels added. "It provides a safety net so that things don't fall through the cracks. Not that we would rely only on that, but it's a second measure of safety and it elevates the human voice."

But, again, it's not just that AI is listening and transcribing. It's also ameliorating cognitive workload -- the effort to remember facts about the patient, making clinical decisions and connect on a human level. That's going to pay dividends moving forward, according to Bina.

"AI is like having a hundred assistants on your team because it does all the hunting and gathering, so it finds out what's been going on with the patient, summarizes all that information for the physician so when they walk in the room, they're more informed and understand why the patient is there that day," he concluded.

Sara Heath has reported news related to patient engagement and health equity since 2015.

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