Note-Taking AI Reduces Doctor Burnout

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By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on Aug 21, 2025.

via HealthDay

THURSDAY, Aug. 21, 2025 — It can be spooky to realize that Alexa or Siri has been listening in on you, when a device in your home inadvertently springs to life.

But eavesdropping artificial intelligence (AI) can prove a godsend to overworked doctors, protecting them from burnout by handling some of their paperwork, a new study says.

Ambient AI “scribes” that listen in on patient visits and draft clinical notes from recordings contributed to significant reductions in doctor burnout, according to findings published today in JAMA Network Open.

Burnout fell by 21% at the Mass General Brigham health care system in Boston thanks to AI scribes, while Emory Heathcare in Atlanta saw a nearly 31% reduction, results show.

“Our physicians tell us that they have their nights and weekends back and have rediscovered their joy of practicing medicine,” co-senior researcher Dr. Rebecca Mishuris, chief medical information officer at Mass General Brigham, said in a news release. “There is literally no other intervention in our field that impacts burnout to this extent.”

Burnout affects more than 50% of U.S. doctors and has been linked to time spent filling out electronic health records, particularly after hours. In particular, the burden of completing patient appointment notes weighs heavily on docs, researchers said in background notes.

“Burnout adversely impacts both providers and their patients who face greater risks to their safety and access to care,” said co-senior researcher Dr. Lisa Rotenstein, director of the Center for Physician Experience and Practice Excellence at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “This is an issue that hospitals nationwide are looking to tackle.”

For this study, researchers surveyed doctors who were pilot users of AI scribe technology, which is also known as “ambient documentation.”

The AI programs listen to patient visits and then draft clinical notes for the doctors, who review the AI-generated reports before entering them into electronic health records.

Mass General Brigham’s ambient documentation program launched in July 2023 with 18 docs, and by a year later it had expanded to more than 800 physicians. As of April 2025, the AI scribes had been made available to all of the system’s providers, with more than 3,000 routinely relying on the tools.

About half of 264 Mass General Brigham doctors surveyed said they used AI scribes in at least 50% of their patient visits, and around 44% of 62 Emory docs said they used the AI for most or all of their visits, results show.

At both health care systems, doctors gave the systems a “likely-to-recommend” score of 8 out of 10, meaning they would vouch for the AI’s usefulness to other physicians.

“Exceptionally helpful,” one doctor said in written comments. “Definitely improves my contact with patients and families, and definitely makes clinic easier.”

Another wrote: "It definitely improves my joy in practice because I get to interact with patients and look them in the eye without worrying I will forget what they are saying later. As the tools grow, I think they will fundamentally change the experience of being a physician.”

However, the doctors weren’t shy about noting the downsides of AI scribes.

One doc said the AI note-taking gives them back an hour out of their day, but another complained that it added one to two hours to their daily note writing.

“It is a nuisance to copy and paste and do all the editing, but that is somewhat mindless work, whereas actually creating the text from scratch hours later requires more thinking,” a third doctor said. ”In the afternoon, I don’t focus as well and when busy charts will stack up, I no longer have the bandwidth to do the notes. Having them already half done is great.”

Researchers said they will continue to track whether burnout rates improve over time as the AI evolves.

“Ambient documentation technology offers a step forward in health care and new tools that may positively impact our clinical teams,” said lead researcher Dr. Jacqueline You, a digital clinical lead and primary care physician at Mass General Brigham.

“While stories of providers being able to call more patients or go home and play with their kids without having to worry about notes are powerful, we feel the burnout data speak similar volumes of the promise of these technologies, and importance of continuing to study them,” she added in a news release.

Sources

  • Mass General Brigham, news release, Aug. 21, 2025

    • Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

    Source: HealthDay

    Posted : 2025-08-22 06:00

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