What are AI scribes?

AI scribes are quickly becoming a staple for providers, as consultancy McKinsey estimated 10+% of US physicians are already using the tools.

Tech companies like Abridge, Ambience, Suki, Nabla, and Microsoft have stepped forward as leaders in the AI scribe space, providing technology that can listen to patient–provider conversations and help formulate clinical documentation. Electronic health records (EHR) companies Epic, Athenahealth, and Oracle have also already integrated this technology into their platforms.

Jon Ebbert, a physician and lead of voice programs at Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, told Healthcare Brew AI scribes are going to “transform” healthcare. The scribe market was worth $397.1 million in 2024 and is estimated to reach nearly $3 billion by 2033, per Grand View Research.

What does an AI scribe do?

For every appointment, clinicians have to create a patient note describing conditions and treatments to upload into an EHR.

Providers have long complained about burnout from clinical documentation, including “pajama time,” where they are forced to continue work at home after their shifts end. The American Medical Association (AMA) reported back in 2016 that physicians spent more time on notes than with patients. In updated survey results, AMA reported that 43.2% of 18,000 physicians had “at least one symptom of burnout” in 2024.

Enter AI scribes.

Matt Troup, senior director of clinical success at Abridge, described the tool as “a system of intelligence for clinical conversations.” Abridge is a scribe used at 200+ health systems including Mayo Clinic; Oakland, California-based Kaiser Permanente; New York-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; and UChicago Medicine.

More simply put: Scribes listen to conversations to analyze which questions the provider asked as well as the determined care plan, create a transcript, and draft a clinical note from the transcript much faster than a human—and in real time.

The providers are required to check the notes before finalizing them in the EHR to assure accuracy and make adjustments as needed.

What are the benefits of these tools?

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of AI scribes is the time they save.

In a 10-week pilot of 3,442 physicians and 300,000 patient encounters, these tools saved 15,700 hours of work, the New England Journal of Medicine reported in June.

As a result of that time saved, AI scribes allow providers to focus more on their patients, Ebbert said.

“You’re not worried so much about the documentation. At least for my practice where I’m using these tools, I can spend more time looking at the patient,” he said.

What do providers look for in these tools?

Mayo Clinic—which has about 83,000 employees across 16 hospitals, 45 multispecialty clinics, and one mobile health clinic—has worked with Abridge and Ambience for the last year and a half, Ebbert said. With about 4,200 providers currently using them, the health system is trying to get more clinicians to adopt the tools.

When it comes to picking which scribe companies to work with, Ebbert says he has a few requirements. First, he said he likes tools that allow clinicians to “tailor the output.” For example, what a primary care physician needs in a note is much different than a sub-speciality physician, who may require more details.

“As you would imagine, everybody’s got different needs, and everybody wants that note to look a certain way,” he said.

With that in mind, Ebbert also said tools that condense the note too much are not ideal.

Clinicians “want the ability for these AI scribes to have richness to their cognitive process without oversimplifying that cognitive process into a couple sentences or bullet points,” he said.

What’s the future of AI scribes?

These tech companies are quickly pivoting to become more of a total copilot tool that can use AI for several administrative tasks throughout the care journey, rather than strictly just a scribe.

“To be honest, it goes so far beyond notes,” Troup said. “Notes was an entry point for us in the early stages of [Abridge’s] development. But we’ve come to realize that there is so much other opportunity.”

Copilots, such as one product Ambience released in August, can provide clinicians real-time information of a patient’s medical history, for example, which can be considered during appointments.

In the future, Ebbert said he’s hoping for “good integration” with EHR technology because it makes it easier to continue the care process. In other words, if a physician orders a blood test during an appointment, the ambient listening tool can immediately begin that order as part of its workflow.

Ebbert is also hopeful about AI translation services, so physicians and patients can communicate across languages.

“In 30 years of medicine, nothing has transformed my medical practice more than these tools,” Ebbert said. “Nothing has had as much of an impact on my ability to get through the day in a timely, well-paced way.”