While some of us don’t remember how we functioned before AI, physicians like Nancy Cibotti would probably tell you the stress of the clinical day pre-AI is hard to forget.
For most of her career, Cibotti, a primary-care physician and CMIO of Heidi, would spend dozens of hours each week gathering data, studying discharge summaries, reviewing images, taking notes and double-checking information. On top of seeing 20 patients per day.
“Before I even step into the room I'm sort of reviewing quickly ... everything that's happened to that patient since the last time I saw them,” she told Tom Foley, who moderated her 30-minute session for Healthcare NOW Radio’s AI in Action: Real-World Healthcare AI Deployments virtual event. “Then … as I'm talking to the patient I'm frantically typing on the computer trying to take notes during the course of the visit or looking up information that maybe I have missed.”
After the visit, Cibotti would stay late to finish her notes.
“Typically, on a Friday night, I wouldn't get home any sooner than 7 o'clock because I had all these notes to complete,” she said. “And if I didn't complete them on Friday, I'd be spending my Saturday morning on them.”
Ambient AI transformed Cibotti’s entire clinical and personal life, starting with her weekends.
What Cibotti didn’t expect was how quickly things would change, enabling her to reclaim her workflow and work-life balance.
“Now there are AI tools that can summarize the information of the patient before I set foot in the room,” said Cibotti. “It can take a 20-page discharge summary and give me a nice, neat paragraph about what happened to that patient during that hospitalization ... I use an AI scribe, I put my computer aside. I face the patient. I have eye contact. Everything is captured and the note is structured immediately in the way that I think.”
What’s even more remarkable, Foley and Cibotti agreed, was that these benefits are only scratching the surface of what’s possible as technology continues to evolve.
While ambient AI scribes are one of the most popular AI applications for healthcare providers, newer AI applications hold even greater potential for improving workflow, reducing medical and billing errors, speeding up claims processing, and ensuring the most up-to-date clinical guidance is pushed to the point of care.
“I am a believer that by 2030 we will be in an autonomous care delivery model using AI,” said Foley. “The value is really about who can implement a patient-engagement strategy that engages them in that 8,745 hours [between visits] that ultimately is going to keep them on track or on the pathway to wellness relative to the [care] plan.”
Cibotti marveled at the potential of using AI agents to reach out to that patient to gather additional information, and even influence their actions, between visits, such as through nudges to schedule appointments or take medications.
This tracks with multiple trends. As healthcare organizations explore additional AI use cases, they’re looking more closely at vendor partners whose AI applications can work in sync. One example: AI tools that allow clinicians to easily retrieve concise, cited medical summaries and upload their own custom documents to enhance practice notes.
“So I think health systems are moving away from these [point] solutions like ‘one vendor that does this another that does that’ … what we need is truly an AI platform that informs [a scribe],” said Cibotti, suggesting that such a tool could augment scribe notes by gathering data before the visit will help the physician write the visit, then queries a medical knowledge base and determines next steps for the patient.
In an ideal scenario, an AI care partner offers tools that cover the entire cycle of a patient encounter, from booking an appointment to submitting a bill, interfacing with the patient at multiple touchpoints across the care continuum.
“I see a world in which, you know, my AI is going to remind me, ‘you’re due for your colonoscopy, you have a family history of colon cancer’ [and] schedule it for when I have, you know, time on my schedule at the location that I want and then, order the Uber to take me when that appointment’s there,” Cibotti said. “That's where I see AI going.”
