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As we've shown in many different instances over the past couple years here at Healthcare IT News, hospitals and health systems across the U.S. (and abroad) are finding some significant success with ambient scribes and other natural language processing tools for voice-enabled clinical documentation.
But those successes don't come without some serious planning and multi-party pre-rollout discussion. And in many cases, the actual ROI of AI scribes is still somewhat up in the air.
"There is one group that does benefit tremendously, and that's clinicians who are slow typists," said Wendy Charles, assistant professor of health informatics and healthcare management at the University of Denver.
Beyond that, "there's uncertainty in many ways about how to implement ambient scribes responsibly," she said. "There's a lot of questions that don't get asked. A lot of workflow issues had not been sufficiently addressed, as well as the nature of oversight and data collection."
Charles will be presenting a session titled, "Stakeholder Governance Strategies for Ambient Artificial Intelligence Scribes: An Interactive Workshop," scheduled for March at the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas.
She'll be joined by Renée Pratt, faculty member in the Computer Science and Information Systems department at the University of North Georgia, and Jack Crumbly, department head at Tuskegee University's Andrew F. Brimmer College of Business and Information Science.
Good governance is essential
Ambient scribe apps are a hot commodity in healthcare nowadays, but as healthcare organizations race to pilot implementations and expand their use in clinical settings, many still aren't answering some basic questions about how best to do so.
At HIMSS26, in what is meant to be an interactive session where audience members are given the opportunity to share their own views and experiences with the panelists, Charles, Pratt and Crumbly aim to explore ongoing concerns around patients' experiences with these tools, questions of consent and understanding, privacy and security, and more.
Essentially, the aim is to explore governance approaches and best practices to ensure AI scribe technology is aligned with larger organizational strategy.
"Our goal, hopefully, is to help to both collect and synthesize best practices and information about what patients, clinicians and information technologists are doing," said Pratt. "Our overarching goal is to help with the defining of AI governance tools that would be focused specifically for these stakeholders. We're going to give them a chance to share what's happening in their space and then converse, and then we'll take that information and consolidate and synthesize it so that they have the opportunity to understand maybe some more specific action items that they can house within their AI governance."
"A big part of what we are hoping to achieve from our interactions with healthcare and with AI scribe companies is that there's uncertainty in many ways about how to implement it responsibly," said Charles.
"One of the huge areas that HIMSS has identified, in fact, was showcased in a recent webinar, is that many organizations are not actually seeing a reduction in charting time yet," she added. "For whatever reason, even though clinicians are pretty happy with ambient AI scribes, they're not closing their charts any earlier. They're not seeing a reduction in Pajama time. They're not seeing a reduction in cognitive load for the charting that they have to update.
"We do potentially see some benefits during an encounter, but a big part of oversight is ensuring that organizations are also maintaining those KPIs and continuing to engage stakeholders as additional parties for how best to achieve the shared goals," said Charles.
Patients have voices too
Another challenge is that many organizations focus so much on the potential benefits for clinicians that they lose sight of the patient experience – and patients' expectations.
"Patients have a lot of questions about what actually is being done with their information," Charles explained. "Can they refuse? Some scribes use recordings, some simply do transcriptions. Patients have questions about their recording, what could possibly happen to it, who could possibly access it if there's a breach. Patients also have questions about who would be able to access their information.
"Organizations as part of governance are also really struggling with how to obtain permission from patients," she added. "Some are deciding to put it in the notice of privacy practices and saying, 'If you receive care at this organization, we use ambient AI scribes, and that's the way it is.' Others are obtaining permission during each individual encounter with the clinician.
"When I went to my doctor who's been using ambient AI scribes for two years, there's just simply a notice in the clinic examination room saying, 'We use ambient AI scribes in our encounter. Talk to your clinician if you have any questions.' There was nothing about permission, or respect."
The goal, said Charles, should be to "find the right approach that demonstrates respect for likely questions and concerns, but also can streamline operations so that we don't have to keep track for each encounter. There's a lot to work out yet."
For her part, Pratt says there's "definitely hope, and there's potential" for AI scribes to be the sea change in clinical documentation that many are hoping for. "Even though we're not necessarily seeing the positives as quickly as we intended."
But many organizations "are seeing some positives," said Pratt. "And what you're seeing is that those hospitals and clinician offices that are fully engaged in technology tend to have higher productivity from the AI. When they are able to actually connect the various parts from moving from the clinician's office to the patient through the insurance provider, they are seeing a lot more positive increases in time and efficiency."
"Stakeholder Governance Strategies for Ambient Artificial Intelligence Scribes: An Interactive Workshop" is scheduled for Tuesday, March 10, from 10:15-11:15 a.m. in Level 3, San Polo 3501A, at the Venetian at HIMSS26 in Las Vegas.
