AI ambient scribe for clinical documentation

The 2025 federal AI use case inventory lists Abridge and Knowtex ambient scribe pilots at VA, both flagged as high impact. As of June 2026 VHA has deployed Ambient Scribe to all Patient Aligned Care Team primary care providers, including physicians, physician assistants and advanced practice nurses, after a phased rollout that began at 10 VA medical centers.

With the Veteran's verbal consent the tool drafts the progress note from the conversation; the provider reviews and edits it before signing it into the record, and Veterans can opt out at any time, even mid visit. VA plans to extend it to selected outpatient specialty care. No outcome figures are published by VA.

Separately, a VHA funded evaluation, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, had 30 blinded raters score notes from 11 AI scribe tools and 18 human note takers on five standardized primary care cases: human written notes scored higher than AI generated notes on every one of the ten quality domains measured.

This evaluation exercise is not stated to cover the Ambient Scribe product rolled out to Patient Aligned Care Teams specifically, and is VHA's own study, not an independent one, so it does not change the grade of this record.

Charité, the Berlin university hospital, became the first hospital in Germany to test and train Microsoft's Dragon Copilot, AI software that takes over so called ambient documentation of doctor patient conversations. With patient and clinician consent, the software records the conversation in real time and produces structured medical notes that physicians review, approve and complete. Charité is running a six month preview with Microsoft across several outpatient areas and its emergency departments to evaluate whether the technology improves the documentation process and the conversation between doctors and patients; the findings feed back into Microsoft's product development.

An NHS England sponsored study led by the GOSH DRIVE innovation unit tested the TORTUS ambient scribe at nine London sites, including hospitals, GP practices, mental health services and ambulance teams, over more than 17,000 patient encounters. The tool transcribes the consultation and drafts a clinic note and letter that the clinician checks and edits before saving. Direct patient interaction time rose and appointments got shorter; in A&E at St George's University Hospital, clinicians saw more patients per shift. A rollout across GOSH outpatient settings was planned to follow.

PureHealth launched the pilot phase of Nada, an ambient AI tool that listens only within the clinical consultation and captures and organises the clinical notes from the conversation in real time. The pilot follows a multi phase evaluation across SEHA's hospital network in the UAE, from high volume primary care to complex tertiary hospitals. PureHealth's chief executive says introducing Nada across its local and global hospitals lets doctors keep eye contact and spend their time on patients instead of on documentation.

Kaiser Permanente made an ambient documentation tool from Abridge available to doctors and other clinicians at its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices in August 2024, after a year of testing. With the patient's consent, the tool listens to the visit and drafts the clinical note, which the clinician reviews before it enters the record. An analysis by The Permanente Medical Group in Northern California, published in NEJM Catalyst, found that the scribes saved the equivalent of 1,794 working days in one year, and that time savings were concentrated among the most frequent users. The tool does not make decisions or recommendations about care.

Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH), a New England health system of 14 hospitals and 175 primary care practices, is expanding its partnership with the ambient AI scribe vendor Heidi to provide ambient scribing to all of its more than 6,000 providers. An initial six month trial with 1,000 providers found high satisfaction with the quality of generated notes, and reductions in cognitive load and after hours documentation work reported by trial users. The rollout followed clinician led customization of the tool to individual documentation styles rather than a single standardized format.

BJC Health, a St. Louis based health system, and Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine) run a joint Center for Health AI that evaluated the ambient AI scribe Abridge in a pilot with 450 clinicians in 2025, then expanded access to about 4,000 clinicians across BJC Health's East Region by September 2026.

Using encounter level data from the evaluation, the Center found documentation time reduction rose from 8% early in the pilot to 15% by day 150 of use, and after hours documentation time reduction rose from 6% to 20% over the same period, with the strongest adoption in outpatient family medicine, internal medicine, OB/GYN, pediatrics and orthopedic surgery.

Abridge and the health system's chief health AI officer describe the rising figures as a compounding effect of clinicians using the platform more over time, rather than a single before and after comparison.

Mount Sinai Medical Center, the independent teaching hospital in Miami Beach, Florida (unrelated to the New York based Mount Sinai Health System), announced on 28 July 2026 that Epic's ambient documentation feature, branded Chart with Art, is live for its inpatient nurses, after several months of physician use. The tool records the bedside conversation and drafts clinical documentation for a nurse or provider to review and approve before it enters the record, and it works in English and Spanish.

The hospital reports that participating physicians cut the time spent in the chart per encounter by nearly 30%, along with after hours documentation. Mount Sinai says it is the first health system in Florida, and the fourth nationally, to put the nursing version of the tool into use.

Capio, described by its AI vendor as the largest healthcare provider in the Nordics and part of Ramsay Health Care, is rolling out Tandem Health's ambient AI medical scribe broadly across its organisation after a pilot across ten Capio clinics. The scribe captures the conversation between clinician and patient during the visit in real time, transcribes it and generates clinical notes, ready for the clinician to review.

In a partner update Tandem Health published in March 2025, the deputy CEO of Capio Närsjukvård and Capio's chief medical operations officer are quoted saying the tool gives doctors more time with patients instead of writing notes and improves the work environment, patient experience and quality of care; no documentation time or note quality figure specific to Capio is disclosed.

Sutter Health, an integrated health system that delivers care to more than 3.5 million patients in California, expanded the ambient AI scribe Abridge to more than 1,000 clinicians within three months of a pilot, aiming to give clinicians more focused face time with patients, and worked with Abridge to add patient facing visit summaries to the electronic health record. In a case study, Abridge reports that Sutter Health clinicians using the platform said their work satisfaction, note quality, cognitive load and undivided attention with patients all improved, in figures drawn from clinician surveys rather than an independent study; clinicians quoted describe being able to focus on the patient and the diagnosis instead of typing during the visit.

Reid Health, a rural health system serving 280,000 people in Indiana and Ohio, finalized an enterprise wide agreement for the ambient AI scribe Abridge in August 2024, after some clinicians had already used it for six months, integrated directly into Epic's workflow. Reid Health reports that since deploying Abridge the time it takes to respond to a patient call fell by 87%, clinicians spent an average of 60% less time on after hours documentation, and the effort needed to complete notes fell by 86%, with patients reporting their clinicians were more present during office visits. A clinician quoted in the announcement said the tool works across South Asian dialects she uses in practice.