St. Luke’s partnership seeks to reduce clinician burnout

A company specializing in artificial intelligence platforms for health care documentation, scribing, coding and patient summaries has partnered with a Boise medical group to help benefit doctors and patients.

San Francisco-based Ambience Healthcare has teamed up with St. Luke’s, having launched a pilot study that resulted in a 25% reduction in clinician burnout and almost 23% increase in patient face time for clinicians.

According to St. Luke’s, the health system used Ambience’s AI platform for most of 2024 throughout 11 of its specialty practices to help automate routine tasks such as documentation, coding and clinical documentation improvement, along with patient summaries for clinicians integrated into the Epic records program.

Considering the pilot study a success, St. Luke’s has decided all its clinicians will now have access to the platform “to support them before, during and after every visit with their patients,” a release stated.

“Our mission at St. Luke’s is to improve the health of the people in the communities we serve,” said Reid Stephan, vice president and chief information officer at St. Luke’s. “With ambient AI technology, we can significantly remove the burden of administrative work from clinicians, allowing them to focus more on providing patients with best-in-class care.”

Thanks to the pilot study, Ambience is already deployed at St. Luke’s across 11 of its specialty practices, including neurobehavioral health, family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, adult behavioral health, neurosurgery, cardiology, nephrology, pediatric nephrology, pediatric hematology oncology and neurology.

Since launching the program, St. Luke’s saw improvements in several areas, which included:

• 22.8% increase in patient face time
• 38.8% decrease in documentation time
• 40.2% decrease in documentation outside of working hours
• 30.3% decrease in hours to close encounters
• 25% decrease in severe clinician burnout

According to Ambience, its “platform is built with robust security and compliance features, meeting industry standards such as HIPAA, SOC 2 Type I and II, and GDPR. Ambience also recently earned a 97.7/100 rating from KLAS Research in a Spotlight Emerging Solutions Report in the ambient AI category, underscoring its leadership in addressing healthcare administrative challenges. In particular, the KLAS report highlights that Ambience’s AI platform is ‘coding-aware,’” meaning it is compliant in coding and revenue cycle.

“At St. Luke’s, we needed an enterprise solution capable of supporting our diverse specialties, care settings and complex payer arrangements, from fee-for-service to value-based contracts,” Stephan said. “We also sought a partner leading in AI innovation. Within just 12 weeks of rolling out, the choice was clear to move forward. We’re also now rolling out frontier capabilities such as ambient inpatient support.”