What is Ambient AI?
Ambient artificial intelligence, or ambient AI, is artificial intelligence designed to adapt to and recognize human interactions in the background, in daily settings.
In healthcare, ambient AI enables human conversations to flow without interruption with AI assisting clinical workflows. Ambient AI in medical practice typically handles tasks like transcription, note generation, and context provision. Since then, it has grown well beyond these core functions.
In this article, we explore the rise of ambient artificial intelligence and how it became a clinical tool clinicians actually rely on.
The Rise of Ambient Artificial Intelligence
Ambient AI has reached clinicians faster than nearly any other tool in recent times, driven by pressures that were already at breaking point. The vision from its early days stays true to its application today: ambient AI transcribes and structures patient conversations so clinicians are less likely to burn out.
With this, ambient AI tools have become part of how clinicians work every day. Due to their growing utility, these tools have become embedded in care delivery in ways that benefit clinicians and their patients. Factors driving adoption include:
- Burnout - Administration burden is the leading contributor to clinician burnout. A joint CMA/CFIB report puts the cost at 20 million hours a year, or 9.1 hours per week on desk work alone. Freeing clinicians from that volume of admin is one reason ambient AI has gained such traction.
- Workforce Shortages - The increasing rates of clinicians feeling burnout symptoms affect the workforce at large. To help decrease wait times and ease scheduling pressure, ambient AI handles routine documentation so clinicians can see more patients across their day.
- Financial Pressures - Over 55% of Canadian public hospitals are running at a deficit, per the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), as inflation and rising demand for physician time strain already-tight budgets. Ambient AI eases that strain by cutting the cost of care delivery and putting resources where they're needed most.
- Improved Outcomes - Clinical workflows have become more consistent, and patients report higher trust when their clinician is fully present in the room.
- Consumer Behavior - Clinicians are increasingly open to flexible, tech-enabled tools that improve their workflows and strengthen the patient experience.
The efficiency gains ambient AI delivers are now part of how many clinicians structure their day. Considering these adoption factors, both patients and clinicians have been found to be comfortable and fulfilled with using ambient AI during sessions.
For instance, Heidi’s ambient AI assistant helped Dr. Sarah Bellefontaine restore rapport with her clients at Four Wings Psychology. "I feel like I'm more with my client," shares Dr. Bellefontaine, a psychologist and clinic director in Ottawa. She no longer spends sessions half-focused on what she's documenting or worrying about missing something important, and by the end of the day her notes are already finished, freeing up evenings she used to lose to admin.
5 Best Ambient AI Tools for Canadian Doctors
Healthcare professionals prioritise patient care quality above anything else. To support that, ambient AI tools lessen the administrative load by transcribing the appointment and pulling the clinical detail you need into a structured note. Ambient AI’s ‘always on’ capability opens up a range of use cases in healthcare, including:
1. Ambient AI Transcription and Dictation
Medical transcription is the first and major feature common among ambient AI providers. Hospitals and clinics can now easily reduce human error in documentation by using ambient AI scribes.
An ambient AI scribe like Heidi transcribes patient conversations in real time, picking up speech word by word into a structured transcript you can review as the appointment runs. The transcript appears in a panel as the visit runs, and Heidi uses it to generate a structured clinical note you can review and edit before it goes anywhere.
2. AI-Powered Patient Support
Ambient AI extends its value beyond documentation. It can surface social determinants of health, flag specific patient needs relevant to coding, and draw attention to concerns that might otherwise be missed. You review everything before it informs any next step.
After a patient session, whether online or in-person, ambient AI can generate tailored summaries and flag follow-up tasks such as specialist referrals.
3. Ambient Artificial Intelligence Remote Monitoring
Remote monitoring with ambient AI works through connected devices that gather and surface clinical information for you to review.
For an ambulatory setting, ambient AI can connect with Bluetooth-enabled devices such as lapel microphones to minimise patient discomfort during conversations. This allows clinicians to move around freely while tools like Heidi handle transcription in the background.
4. Automated AI Billing & Insurance
As the AI transcribes the session, it maps spoken language to SNOMED CT CA or ICD-10-CA codes and flags undercoded encounters. It also checks eligibility and handles pre-authorisation during or before the encounter.
Heidi surfaces suggested codes within your note for you to review, so you spend less time on manual coding.
5. Ambient AI Practice Management
Future ambient AI capabilities in clinics could extend to appointment scheduling, staff coordination, and resource planning, all informed by patterns across clinical notes. These are areas under active development across the industry.
Advantages of an Ambient AI Platform vs Traditional Methods
Ambient AI platforms are built to reduce the manual workload in clinical settings while keeping costs manageable. Systematic clinical processes are more efficient as they reduce the cognitive load of clinicians without hurting healthcare finances. Below, we outline the main benefits ambient AI platforms offer over traditional documentation methods.
Ambient AI Platform Performance
Compared to manual documentation, using ambient AI for documentation is proven to reduce charting time by 66%. This makes ambient AI a cost-effective option for high-volume, low-cognition tasks like documentation across any discipline.
Ambient AI Platform Integration
Connecting ambient AI with your EHR, EMR, or PMS has delivered significant time savings, with some practices reporting up to 120,000 minutes recovered from documentation. Ambient AI reviews also reveal that productivity among Allied Health Practitioners (AHPs) increased by a 5.8% average against a 1-3 month timeline.
Ambient AI Platform Workflow
As clinical workflows in medical settings become more automated, communication between clinicians and AHPs is more seamless. On top of this, clinicians can also stay focused even when working in remote areas, with fewer interruptions across the visit.
Ambient AI Platform Impact
In comparison to traditional methods, ambient AI has eliminated the need for extensive editing for documentation. Research into ambient AI performance has found that AI-generated notes match or exceed the quality and accuracy of manually written ones, particularly for high-volume specialties. As its clinical applications continue to evolve, the impact of ambient AI has significantly benefited clinicians.
Of all potential use-cases, ambient AI medical scribes are the most well-developed. They have already demonstrated safety and efficacy and achieved strong uptake among clinicians.
Heidi works through more than half a million visits each week in Canada alone, making it one of the most widely used ambient AI tools available to clinicians today.
Try Heidi's Ambient AI Technology for Free
Most clinicians finish their last visit of the day and then spend another hour or more on documentation. Heidi is built to close that gap. Every visit you run generates the note, the letters and the follow-up communication, so the work does not follow you home.
- No cost to start: Heidi's free version includes core documentation functions, so you can try it on a real patient day without any upfront commitment.
- Documentation that keeps up with you: Heidi receives audio from your session and builds a structured, editable clinical note in seconds, whether you are at your desk or between ward rounds.
- An evening that is actually yours: With the note, referral letters and patient instructions handled from a single visit, the admin that used to run past clinic hours stays where it belongs.
Clinicians across more than 200 specialties have saved 9.2 million hours using Heidi. For Canadian clinicians, Heidi is independently certified to ISO 27001:2022 and built to keep patient data secure in line with PIPEDA and applicable provincial privacy requirements.
FAQs About Ambient Artificial Intelligence
In the US, human medical scribes cost around $40,000 per annum. This figure is around $95,000 (AUD) in Australia and £24,000 in the UK. On the other hand, healthcare ambient AI assistants generally start at $600 per month, per person. Thankfully, Heidi starts at $0 from which you can benefit for life.