We’re taking a short break from health policy and the 12 days of ACCESS to rehash a clinical AI story. In 2025, ambient scribes proliferated and they got squeezed as well. I anticipate as native EHRs roll out more of their ambient scribes, the market is going to contract and contort in interesting ways.
Ambient scribes have become the default “first use case” for clinical AI.
Vendors promise hours back to doctors, reclaimed evenings, and a future where the note writes itself while we focus entirely on the patient.
A recent STAT News piece pulled together the best evidence we have so far on whether that vision is actually coming true. I turned it into a short Techy Surgeon video explainer you can watch above (love making these videos, it’s just very gratifying), but I also wanted to lay out the numbers here.
The short version: ambient scribes don’t yet deliver the clean financial ROI many people imagine…but they DO seem to help clinicians feel less crushed by documentation. And that matters.
What the studies show on “time saved”
Across the early randomized and observational studies, the story is remarkably consistent:
In a randomized trial at UCLA, clinicians using AI-powered scribes saved on the order of 20–30 seconds per visit compared with usual care.
In a study from Wisconsin using Abridge, ambient documentation reduced total documentation time by about 22 minutes per day.
Those are not trivial numbers, but they are also not the “two hours back every clinic day and an extra visit to squeeze in” narrative that dominates marketing decks.
That’s a big, sobering gap on expectations if you’re a CFO evaluating ROI purely on time savings.
So why are clinicians (and investors) still excited?
Because something else is showing up consistently in the data:
Even when the time savings are modest, burnout scores improve.
In these early studies, clinicians using ambient scribes report:
Less emotional exhaustion
Lower mental load from documentation
A generally better experience of their clinic day
The hands on the clock don’t move much, but the experience of work does. That’s hard to price in a traditional ROI model…and impossible to ignore if you’re actually practicing medicine.
The missing layers for true financial ROI
If ambient scribes only replace human scribes or take a small bite out of after-hours charting, the math is shaky.
For these tools to generate clear financial ROI, they’ll need to plug into a broader automation workflow:
Upstream: smarter intake, templated plans, and structured data capture.
Downstream: automatic coding, quality reporting, and care coordination tasks triggered from the note.
Across the continuum: reuse of the same structured data for value-based programs (ACCESS, TEAM, PRO-PMs, etc.).
Right now, most ambient scribe deployments still stop at “nice note, slightly faster.” The next wave of use cases must look more like “note → data → automated work that someone used to do manually.”
Emotional ROI is still ROI
As a surgeon and founder, I’m wary of tools that are all story and no signal. But I love my ambient scribe. And I’m also honest about the fact that feeling less ground down by documentation has its own incredible value:
It can help keep people in practice.
It can make full clinical days sustainable.
It can create the mental space needed to actually engage with patients, learners, and quality improvement.
If a tool barely moves the clock but helps clinicians feel less burned out, I wouldn’t call that a failure. I’d call it baseline value, and then challenge the ecosystem to build the automation around it that makes the financials work too.
🎥 Video explainer:
I walk through these studies and the ROI question in more detail in the Techy Surgeon explainer video embedded above. If you want to see how I make these video explainers in under an hour using Gemini 3 pro, Claude, and CapCut, consider becoming a paid subscriber to get access to my Techy Surgeon tutorials!
If you’re experimenting with ambient scribes in your clinic or health system, I’d love to hear what you’re seeing…both on the clock and in how it feels to practice.
