Lessons learned from the Kaiser Permanente rollout of ambient AI scribes

When Permanente physician leaders talk about health care innovations, there’s no shortage of insights for any organization navigating the rapidly changing technology landscape. Brian Hoberman, MD, executive vice president of IT and CIO at The Permanente Federation, recently spoke at the HIMSS25 conference where he presented learnings about Kaiser Permanente’s systemwide rollout of ambient AI scribe technology.

With patient consent, ambient AI transcribes patient-clinician conversations during office visits to create accurate notes. So far, the tool has reduced the time clinicians spend typing up notes during and following appointments. To ensure this technology creates real value for doctors and patients alike, the goals of this tool focus on improving the patient experience and easing physician workload, in addition to enhancing the quality of care.

“The ultimate goal of health care IT was always: Make me a better doctor,” said Dr. Hoberman.

Ambient technology does more than free up physicians to focus on their patients, although that is a significant benefit. Dr. Hoberman noted the tool can also capture more detail than human memory. When physicians edited the ambient AI notes, they noticed the tool picked up more information than they remembered, something valuable when discussing complex cases.

“Particularly for visits where history-taking is important, it’s indispensably useful,” said Dr. Hoberman.

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Dr. Hoberman noted that adoption of the tool was aided by physicians sharing how much it helped them and by its integration with existing systems. “Somebody who might even be a little bit reluctant to try technology discovers it’s actually very easy to use because it’s integrated into the EMR and, lo and behold, you have a new user,” said Dr. Hoberman.

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When asked about potential future applications for ambient AI, Dr. Hoberman discussed its possible use in supporting real-time decisions and formulating follow-up questions for patients.

“A frontier in the industry is going to be how do we take advantage of the ability for ambient [AI] to understand what’s being said and work with the [electronic medical record] to provide useful nudges in whatever type of thing might be useful to the clinician,” said Dr. Hoberman.

Read the entire Becker’s Hospital Review Q&A here.