Ambient AI: Healthcare Facility Guide and FAQ
Artificial intelligence (AI) that works quietly in the background — without the need for direct user involvement — is known as ambient AI. Healthcare visits may benefit from the integration of this novel technology.
By handling low-value tasks like data input, AI has the capacity to ease clinical workloads, while freeing the clinician to concentrate more fully on the patient. Yet, as with any technology used in healthcare, it has its challenges. In this overview, we’ll review key considerations about this technological advancement and answer some of the most frequently asked questions.
How Ambient AI Works in Healthcare: Overview
You may be familiar with AI, as its presence is increasingly embedded in our daily lives through search engine assistance and other outlets. But, What is ambient AI exactly? “Ambient” refers to the surrounding environment. So, ambience in the context of AI refers to the intelligence tool’s seamless integration into the clinical environment as quiet, background assistance.
Pros and Cons of Ambient AI: Healthcare Considerations
In a setting where staff shortages are a frequent challenge, the idea of an always-available, background helper can be highly appealing. The supplementation of healthcare teams with technology has its advantages, but also comes with some disadvantages. We’ll examine both below.
| Offloading low-value tasks like data input frees clinicians for more face-to-face time with patients, helping direct more focused attention.Assistance with burdensome duties helps reduce clinician burnout while improving the efficiency and productivity of workflow at lower cost.
Accuracy of documentation may be improved because of the tool’s objective transcription. Diagnostic conclusions may be expedited because of technology’s ability to analyze and verify medical imaging and data results. |
Patients are still substantially resistant to AI, and may distrust its implementation within their care environment.With the use of additional AI software, more data access points are created for protected health information (PHI), jeopardizing data privacy and protection.
The cost of AI technologies can be inhibitive to some facilities. Digitizing the care team may reduce the human aspect of care, leading to less sympathy and/or empathy for patients when they’re suffering. |
Key Considerations of Implementing Ambient AI in Clinical Settings
As healthcare leaders aim to modernize care and ensure the best possible outcomes while optimizing efficiency, it’s crucial that its advantages and disadvantages factor into the implementation approach.
1. Prioritize Value-Based Care While Managing Change
Change management is largely about readying mindsets and influencing culture. As you ready your clinicians for an innovative AI program (like a new ambient AI scribe), be sure that you’re maintaining focus on value-based care, and demonstrating how this is about a better patient experience — not just lowering costs and increasing efficiency.
2. Embed Patient Safety Goals
The program should contribute to improved patient safety. Because of the risks associated with ambient AI, healthcare companies and clinical leaders need to ensure patient safety by addressing two different aspects of that risk.
- Health information privacy must be assured. With additional software accessing data, healthcare leaders need to make sure it’s both private and safe from the possibility of malware attacks or breach.
- Whether AI can handle the assigned tasks and workload needs to be firmly established prior to offsetting those jobs.
3. Ensure the Initiative’s Clinical Sustainability
New technologies can be costly. It’s important to review the associated expenses and compare the service availability among different healthcare AI service vendors. Choose an option that’s affordable for the long-term and ideally, a seamless addition to existing electronic health record (EHR) technologies.
Ambient AI: Healthcare-Specific FAQ
Now that you have a general understanding of the topic, let’s clear up some of the more detailed aspects of ambient AI in healthcare by answering some pertinent follow-up questions.
AI vs. ambient AI, what’s the difference?
Traditional AI requires direct user interaction for data input or queries. However, ambient AI is meant to be invisible, collecting information and accomplishing assigned tasks in the background without requiring direct user involvement.
Example:
- Traditional AI: A provider queries a chatbot about a patient concern, then incorporates the information into their care approach.
- Ambient AI: Ambient listening AI records a patient’s concern, transcribing it into the health record.
Is ambient AI already being used in healthcare?
Yes — ambient AI is in use across many healthcare settings already. The Permanente Medical Group program, for instance, piloted the use of an ambient AI scribe. Healthcare professionals reported largely favorable experiences, and the follow-up study concluded that ambient AI documentation assistance saved physicians nearly 15,700 productive hours.
More EHR systems are also beginning to adopt AI capabilities into their service offerings. Patient interview transcriptions and discharge summaries are just two examples of AI-delegated tasks for providers that use Epic ambient AI charting.
What is ambient AI’s best healthcare use?
The goal of ambient AI is to save clinician time and focus by offloading low-value tasks. The most value-added use is subjective, but some examples of helpful ambient AI tasks include:
- Clinical documentation support.
- Diagnostic findings analysis (such as reviewing x-rays for abnormal results).
- Patient data analysis for identifying and highlighting patient risk (like flagging patients at greater risk of chronic kidney disease, for example).
- Scheduling and other administrative tasks.
How can healthcare leaders protect their patients from the risks of AI use?
We’ve already discussed the risks associated with ambient AI, now let’s review some additional considerations for how healthcare leaders can align technologies like an ambient AI scribe with their safety goals.
| Provide transparency about its use with patients and all staff. | Patients deserve to know when ambient listening AI is transcribing what they’re telling their doctors. Care team members also need to know when an ambient AI scribe is working behind the scenes — not just to avoid duplicate efforts, but to ensure their autonomy isn’t compromised.
Because of pre-existing mistrust and hesitance around its implementation, its use in the clinical setting risks further erosion of trust unless full transparency is maintained. |
| Ensure the cybersecurity of any EHR upgrade or adjacent AI system. | To maintain federal compliance, healthcare organizations must ensure that any new systems handling PHI maintain the rules (namely HIPAA considerations) around information privacy.
Healthcare leaders need to confirm that administrative, physical, and technical safeguards are in place to support data security with any new AI program. |
| Develop AI-specific education and training for care teams. | To facilitate the best possible change management process with any innovative programs, the education component needs to give care team members the why of implementation in addition to the how.
Training should be user-specific, targeting the different ways interdisciplinary team members may interact with the technology. |
| Delegate healthcare tasks to ambient AI slowly and intentionally. | “Start low, go slow” is a great motto for healthcare teams implementing AI. The initial delegated tasks should be at the lowest end of the impact scale so that they can be evaluated for effectiveness with as little risk to patients as possible.
Offloaded work should continue to be selected intentionally as the program progresses and trust builds. |
| Maintain clinical oversight, updating the program as needed. | It’s important that care team members maintain accountability for care provision — meaning, the work of ambient AI is still the responsibility of clinicians. It needs to be reviewed for accuracy and relevancy, rather than taken for granted.
With monitoring and oversight, issues are more readily flagged and revisions can be made before patient safety or outcomes are jeopardized. |
Will ambient AI replace nurses, doctors, and other care team members?
This question has worried nursing professionals and other members of the healthcare team. However, AI technologies (ambient and traditional) are meant to augment and complement human-driven clinical efforts, not replace them.
Right now, ambient AI isn’t capable of non-linear problem solving to the same degree as human care team members who can adapt to the rapid change and complexity of patient care more readily. In these vulnerable moments, empathy and trust are often crucial elements of care — and AI isn’t yet capable of simulating these effectively, further evidencing the need for human care team members.
Want to Stay Current Amid Rapid Technological Changes?
It may feel like clinical care’s evolution is happening too fast to track with the cascade of compounding, innovative technologies like ambient AI. Healthcare is evolving, but with IntelyCare’s expert-driven healthcare insights, we make it easy for you to stay informed and ahead of the competition.