St. Luke’s Health System Realizes $13K Annual ROI per Clinician with Ambience Healthcare’s AI Scribe

Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System has reported substantial clinical and financial benefits following the rollout of Ambience Healthcare’s AI-powered documentation automation platform. The technology, integrated with St. Luke’s Epic electronic health record system, has been adopted across multiple specialties and care environments to alleviate administrative workload and improve coding precision.

The implementation follows years of growing documentation burdens experienced during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, which contributed to provider fatigue and burnout. “These repetitive, time-consuming responsibilities were pulling clinicians away from direct patient care, contributing to fatigue and an overall sense that technology was adding friction rather than reducing it,” said Dr. Terry Ribbens, pediatric nephrologist and associate chief medical officer at St. Luke’s. He added, “We monitored EHR pajama time and noticed it was increasing and were concerned this contributed to burnout of our physicians and advanced practice providers.”

Human scribes had previously been used in limited areas, but scalability challenges led St. Luke’s to pursue an AI-based approach. “Our goal was to implement a system that would enable clinicians to concentrate on patient care while automating the documentation process through AI,” Ribbens explained. “The team at Ambience Healthcare really took the time to get to know us. They came to Boise and wanted to deeply understand our health system and worked with us to co-develop technology to handle documentation, coding and note generation in real time across all specialties in our health system.”

Since implementation, 75% of St. Luke’s physicians have adopted the Ambience AI scribe, achieving 83% encounter-level utilization across ambulatory specialties. The results have been notable: a 35% reduction in after-hours documentation time, a 15% increase in patient face time, and a 75% rate of reported reduction in cognitive burden. Financially, the system has generated $13,049 in annual revenue per clinician through improved hierarchical condition category (HCC) and evaluation and management (E/M) coding accuracy.

“This was the first time we had physicians and advanced practice providers clamoring for new technology for the EHR,” Ribbens said. “High utilization across specialties – above 70% – was a key measure of success for us, because true impact only comes when clinicians in every field, from cardiology to neurology, find the technology useful and reliable.”

Ribbens advised other health systems to evaluate AI solutions across varied clinical workflows. “Low utilization indicates that barriers are hindering clinicians from adopting the AI technology. Seeing how these tools perform in real clinical workflows is essential to choosing the right vendor,” he concluded.

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