Accuracy, time, and work-life balance

Historically, providers have faced difficulties completing clinical documentation within working hours. Their administrative and mental burden is heavy, the healthcare system is increasingly complex, and physician burnout is a perennial concern.

With recent, rapid innovation in AI, we're witnessing an evolution. With technology such as athenahealth’s Ambient Notes, which uses ambient listening and generative AI technology to automatically generate clinical notes, providers have new pathways to reduce their workload without compromising quality of care.

Dr. Justin Cardenas, an orthopedic surgeon at Carrell Clinic, a Division of OrthoLoneStar in Texas, experienced a significant transformation in his work after adopting Ambient Notes.

Capturing more detail while staying more present

Before using Ambient Notes, Dr. Cardenas felt pressured to document every possible nuance during a visit. Despite any clinician’s care and effort, it’s impossible to manually capture every detail a patient shares while also considering treatment and staying present in the conversation. It’s a constant compromise – either you can engage with the patient, or you can fully document what they’re sharing.

Ambient Notes helps bridge the gap. Dr. Cardenas can connect with his patients, have a conversation about their care, and rest assured that all of the relevant information is being captured behind-the-scenes. The tool creates a note summary and places it directly into the patient chart, for his review and approval. Now, Dr. Cardenas feels free to fully engage with his patients knowing that the ambient technology is catching every word.

“I think it’s a way to get a very accurate HPI, get a good plan, and save you time on the back end,” he says. “And then in the background, the AI is going through the checkboxes to make sure the documentation is correct and accurate, and it takes this burden off the provider to sit there and type.”

A welcome shift for patients

When considering a solution like Ambient Notes, many providers have worried their patients might be wary. But Dr. Cardenas, and other providers we’ve spoken to, have found the opposite to be true.

Every single patient that Dr. Cardenas has asked for consent to leverage Ambient Notes with agreed. The physician and his patients also find the visit more personal and fulfilling when he doesn’t need to type away the whole visit. “Knowing all of the information is being recorded, I can just listen to them,” he says.

Not only does the patient get more face time with Dr. Cardenas with an Ambient Notes visit, but they also get more information in the follow-up notes. Using this tool, Dr. Cardenas says, didn’t significantly change how he needs to conduct visits, which made for a seamless integration into his visit workflow. But it does encourage him to say more out loud.  “It made me more targeted, making sure I’m sharing the plan I want them to hear,” he explains.

This means the patient hears more about their care plan during the visit and then sees a robust post-visit note with all that information captured. “They appreciate seeing their plan written out,” Dr. Cardenas says. “It gives them reassurance.”

Getting time back and letting Dr. Cardenas “be Dad”

Since introducing Ambient Notes into his workflow, Dr. Cardenas has seen a 36% reduction in his time spent documenting outside of clinic hours. Before, he completed over half of his clinical documentation after-hours; now it’s around 17%.

His average encounter documentation time has dropped by 3.6 minutes per encounter, for a total of 14 hours saved in September, alone. With this shift, his rate of closing encounters the same day he sees a patient increased by 12%.

That dramatic improvement, he notes, doesn’t even account for recent growth in his practice. His clinic has seen an increase from 20 to 35 patients per day, or a 75% increase in patient volume, which would typically lead to a significant increase in administrative burden – with Ambient Notes, his workload has decreased, allowing him to take on this new volume without strain.

Outside of the bottom-line benefits of having more time to grow his practice and engage in patient care, Dr. Cardenas feels that Ambient Notes has had a tangible impact on his home life as well.

Before technology like Ambient Notes, Dr. Cardenas – like many other providers – would get home late and still have documentation hanging over his head. “I had to be like, OK, Dad’s going to put his headphones in and finish my notes for an hour,’” he says.

Since Ambient Notes, he says, “It’s huge. I can get home for dinner and just be Dad. My sons love nothing more than to wrestle around, so I can wrestle with them.”

With a third son on the way, and a thriving practice, getting this time back allows Dr. Cardenas to be fully present in all of his roles: “I have more energy for my patients, too. If a patient calls and needs to talk to me, I have time to go through their issue.”

Leaning into a new world of efficiency

As AI continues to develop, Dr. Cardenas is eager to see how it serves as a catalyst for improvements in healthcare and excited about the future of Ambient Notes in driving the shift from providers “being a slave to the computer” to practicing medicine in a more holistic and human way.

Dr. Cardenas’ father-in-law, who is a primary care physician on the verge of retirement, marvels at his new work-life balance: “I think he’s impressed at how little time I spend documenting outside of the day, his whole career he had to document so much at home. He told me, ‘Man, I got out at the wrong time.’”

With Ambient Notes, Dr. Cardenas carved out more time in his personal life, more time for patients, and more time to grow his business. Get in touch to learn more about what athenaOne and Ambient Notes can do for you.