Electronic health record (EHR) documentation is a primary driver of clinician burnout across all medical specialties, including optometry and ophthalmology. The time required to finalize charts often spills into personal time, ultimately reducing the number of patients a practitioner can see.
AI-powered ambient documentation, or AI scribes, are designed to listen to patient encounters and automatically generate structured clinical notes. A recent study published in JAMA, “Changes in Clinician Time Expenditure and Visit Quantity With Adoption of Artificial Intelligence–Powered Scribes: A Multisite Study,” aimed to quantify whether these tools actually deliver on the promise of reducing EHR burden and increasing clinical productivity in real-world, large-scale settings.
Methodology
The researchers conducted a multisite, longitudinal study involving over 8,500 clinicians across five major U.S. health systems over a period of two years.
- Participants: The study compared over 1,800 clinicians who adopted AI scribes with a control group of over 6,770 clinicians who did not.
- Data Collection: The researchers tracked EHR metadata to measure time in notes, total EHR usage time and after-hours EHR work.
- Variables: Outcomes were analyzed based on the frequency of use (e.g., clinicians using the tool for <50% vs. >50% of visits) and by specialty (primary care vs. specialists).
- Metrics: The primary outcomes were daily time spent in the EHR, documentation time and the average number of patient visits per week.
Results and Implications for Eye Care Practitioners
The study found that AI scribes led to modest but statistically significant improvements in workflow efficiency, with the most benefit seen among high-frequency users.
- Time Savings: On average, AI scribe users saw a reduction of 13 minutes in daily EHR usage and 16 minutes in documentation time. This represented a 3% decrease in total EHR time and a 10% decrease in documentation-specific time.
- The “Usage Threshold:” Clinicians who used the AI scribe for more than 50% of their patient encounters experienced significantly greater benefits—twice the reduction in total EHR time and three times the reduction in documentation time compared to infrequent users.
- Productivity: Adoption was associated with a slight increase in productivity, measured as 0.5 additional patient visits per week.
- Specialty Variance: Primary care clinicians saw more pronounced time savings (approximately 25 minutes) than other specialists.
What this means for Eye Care Practitioners
For optometrists and ophthalmologists, these findings suggest that AI scribes are a viable tool for reclaiming some time throughout the workday, provided the tool is integrated into at least half of all patient exams. While the time saved may not completely eliminate after-hours charting, the modest increase in visit capacity (0.5 visits/week) suggests that the technology can pay for itself over time through increased throughput.
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