AI and doctors: Cautious optimism becomes growing enthusiasm

Over the past year, Dr. Nele Jessel sees a significant shift in the way physicians are utilizing artificial intelligence.

The chief medical officer of athenahealth, Jessel sees doctors growing more comfortable using AI tools. Some physicians still are exercising some caution, but more doctors appear to be accepting and adopting AI tools in their work.

“It's amazing the difference a year makes,” Jessel tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

“A year ago, it looked like physicians were really skeptical of AI,” she says. “It was just going to be yet another thing on their plate. They were cautiously optimistic, but not really sure if it would truly make a difference in their lives or not. Fast forward a year, I think the sentiments are dramatically different, and that just gives you a good idea of how rapidly AI has evolved over the past year, and we've seen that in our own company, too. We went from physicians who were cautiously optimistic to physicians gung ho about AI.”

(See part of our conversation in this video. The story continues below.)

‘Opened physicians’ minds’

An athenahealth survey of 501 physicians released in December shows the growing utilization of AI.

Nearly two out of three doctors (64%) say AI tools eased some of their documentation burden, while 62% said their practices used four or more AI tools. The vast majority of respondents (86%) said they were comfortable with at least partially using AI to identify important details in patient records.

Jessel says she sees the growing success of AI documentation tools as a key factor in the changing attitudes toward physicians. More doctors are using AI-powered documentation solutions that record patient visits and quickly provide summaries of the conversations, significantly cutting down on documentation time.

More doctors are trying AI documentation solutions, or have at least heard of them, she says.

“Documentation burden is so dramatic in clinical medicine, and physicians have complained about this for so many years, that they spend all their time being data entry clerks. They don't have enough time seeing patients. They can barely focus on the visit because the computer is constantly in the way. Those have been the complaints for the last decade-plus, I would say, ever since EHRs became widely adopted,” Jessel says.

Ambient documentation tools have turned the tide, she says. They operate in the background and relieve doctors of constantly typing into computers while listening to the patient and attempting to come up with a diagnosis.

“I think just seeing that has really opened physicians' minds to what's possible, and really made them much more optimistic,” Jessel says.

Now, some doctors and providers are seeing ambient documentation as “the holy grail that finally relieves administrative burden that has crushed practices over those last couple of years,” she says.

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‘The cognitive burden is real’

Hospitals, health systems and other providers say they’ve received strong support for AI documentation tools from their doctors.

Some doctors using AI tools say they’re not having to spend time working on documenting patient visits when they are at home.

“They've gotten their life back. They can spend evenings with their kids again, instead of having to document notes, because it takes a long time. Even if you use templates effectively, and you use all those shortcuts that EHRs bring to the table, depending on the nature of the visit, some notes are still so complex that it takes a long time to write them,” Jessel says.

But she points out that the ambient documentation reduces stress in the office, especially for doctors seeing patients with complex problems.

“If it's a complex visit, it's very hard to pay attention to everything the patient is saying and remember all the details and make the right decisions and place the right order,” Jessel says.

“So the cognitive burden is real,” she continues. “And just by offloading that part of the burden that you have to remember everything the patient says, and remember it by the end of the day and get it to paper, I think it has really freed up physicians’ minds to fully focus on the patient again. Because they know they don't have to worry and reserve part of their brain capacity to remember what they actually have to document at the end of the day.”

Jessel says easing administrative duties helps physicians find more satisfaction in their work.

“When you speak to physicians, they're like, ‘Wow, I actually enjoy medicine again. I was ready to retire, and now I actually look forward to going to the office and seeing my patients.’ I mean, that is a huge, huge shift, and ambient notes have brought this to the table. So I'm personally super excited to see what other use cases we can solve with AI to reduce some of that burden on practices,” she says.

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