Department faculty lead new research on ambient AI use to improve healthcare practitioner well-being
Key results include reduced burnout and EHR documentation time
A randomized trial from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (UW SMPH) and UW Health shows how ambient artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in clinical settings to reduce practitioner burnout and time spent on electronic health record (EHR) documentation.
The study, co-authored by several Department of Medicine (DOM) faculty, was recently published in two parts in the New England Journal of Medicine Artificial Intelligence.
The first article establishes a rigorous trial framework and protocols to design, monitor and evaluate ambient AI within routine care. Researchers partnered with the Learning Health System (LHS) program at the UW–Madison’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) to ensure a multi-disciplinary, evidence-based approach to developing technical workflows, governance structures and a pragmatic randomized trial design.
“By initiating the partnership between UW Health and LHS, we employed best practices in implementation science, pragmatic trials and evaluation to ensure compliance with operational best practices,” says Majid Afshar, MD, MS, associate professor, Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, director of the LHS, and lead author on both articles. “It’s about setting up the technology and the users for success, and continuing to monitor them to make sure everything is working as intended.”
The second article examines the impact of ambient AI on health care practitioner burnout and well-being. It shows that use of the ambient AI scribe system correlated with a clinically meaningful reduction in burnout scores, reduced documentation time by 30 minutes per day per provider, improved the accuracy of the notes for diagnosis billing, and improved other secondary measures on well-being, like task load.
After the successful trial, which ran from August 2024 through March 2025, UW Health expanded the use of ambient AI across clinics and hospitals in Wisconsin and Illinois. Currently, about 800 physicians and advanced practice providers use the technology. A data dashboard allows continued monitoring of how the technology is performing in clinical operations.
Work with the LHS also resulted in the creation of an open-source guide—the Pragmatic Trial Operations Playbook—that has been made available for other health systems looking to introduce this form of AI technology, and to test its safety and effectiveness.