Impact of Unrestricted Artificial Intelligence Scribe Deployment in a Single Health System on Clinician Workload and Productivity : A Quality Improvement Study.

Heidi enrollment in a 14-hospital Boston outpatient health system is associated with an immediate reduction in clinician note-active time by 1.21 minutes, especially in high users.

• Why it matters: Ambient AI scribes may lessen documentation burden and burnout, but it is unclear whether benefits scale with how intensely clinicians use them.
• What they did: In a retrospective interrupted time series from 1 July 2024 to 31 January 2026, enrollment was indexed by each clinician’s enrollment month and adjusted for patient demographics and visit complexity. A secondary 3-group ITS compared enrolled nonusers, low users, and high users.
• The result: Note-active time decreased immediately by 1.21 minutes overall (95% CI, -1.74 to -0.68), with larger reductions in high users (-2.50 minutes; CI, -3.55 to -1.45) than nonusers and low users. High users had greater increases in note length (+170.90 characters; CI, 21.07 to 320.70) than nonusers and low users, while same-day closure, after-hours closure, and wRVUs showed no differences.