Three questions with Jared Sorensen: Exploring the possibilities of an ambient and AI clinical documentation experience

July 23, 2024 / By Jared Sorensen, Courtney Howell-McAnelly

I sat down with Jared Sorensen, global vice president of clinician productivity solutions at Solventum, to discuss how ambient clinical documentation using artificial intelligence (AI) is making waves in healthcare. Here’s what he has to say about its current state, potential and future impact on physicians and care delivery.

Ambient clinical documentation using AI is an emerging space with the potential to transform the healthcare experience for everyone. What buzz are you hearing from the perspective of physicians, leadership and health systems?

The focus of ambient documentation has been to address one of the primary contributors to physician burnout: The task of clinicians documenting their care. Documentation often happens after the regular hours of seeing patients, and not only takes time, but presents a cognitive burden to the physician as well. Physicians are expected to push through a full day of back-to-back visits while trying to remember each patient’s unique plan and assessment, which they then must document later in full (and accurate) detail. Ambient capability aims to improve the patient-physician experience by leveraging technology to do the heavy lifting when summarizing the visit, allowing physicians to focus their time and attention on what matters most – their patients.

Physicians and physician leaders are excited about incorporating ambient and generative AI technology into their care delivery. This builds on related solutions that include transcription, front-end speech and medical scribing. While medical scribes provide a labor-driven solution to the documentation challenge, they have proven to be too expensive for wide-scale deployment within large organizations. Now, there is a technology solution that can be both effective and scalable — and it’s very exciting!

Let’s talk about the AI expectation as a part of ambient technology. What are some obstacles to overcome? Things to keep in mind?

While there are many factors to consider in ambient technology, the two biggest obstacles to overcome are:

1. Ensuring the quality of generated notes is sufficient to save a physician’s time
2. Orchestrating audio capture and user experience with other elements of a physician’s workflow so that adoption of this technology is seamless

When we talk about note quality, AI-generated clinical documentation needs to reflect the patient-physician visit without inaccuracies or added ‘hallucinations.’ Solventum solutions map note summaries directly back to visit transcripts to ensure there is a clear evidence trail to what is ultimately being documented. In addition, we find it important that physicians feel as though they are the ultimate author of their own notes. That’s why our technology can personalize generated notes to reflect a physician’s ‘voice’ and documentation style. We believe that, when done correctly, AI-generated notes should require limited edits once all of these factors are applied.

There are, of course, limitations to what ambient technology can do for note generation. AI-generated notes won’t capture thoughts. They won’t capture the medical decision making that takes place inside a physician’s mind, either. Pre-charting, or post-visit charting with front-end speech, allows physicians to capture elements they are thinking, but not what they are expressing during a patient visit. There still is the need for a diverse toolset that supports how a physician creates documentation in an efficient manner.

Finally, while we are excited about what generative AI can do, there must be appropriate safeguards in place to manage final output. Physicians should still review, finalize and sign off on their work. Ambient notes aren’t a silver bullet, but rather a new powerful tool in a physician’s toolkit.

What’s next on the journey for ambient solutions in healthcare? What should physicians or health systems consider?

As mentioned, we can expect to see technology improve by building physician personalization and preferences into generated notes.

Solventum’s ambient solution incorporates virtual assistance for navigating electronic health records (EHR) and placing orders through voice commands, but AI technology will soon be able to understand elements of the conversation and implicitly set up orders or care plans. This is a virtuous loop of capturing information, drawing insight and setting up/automating actions through ambient listening and AI technologies. It enables the creation of complete and accurate clinical documentation that is essential to support a wide range of areas downstream purposes, from care coordination to quality and from coding to reimbursement.

Ambient and AI-driven clinical documentation technology will continue to impact the complete healthcare experience – not only for physicians, but for all connected care teams and patients as well – as it evolves and gets adopted by physicians and health systems.

There’s a wonderful opportunity this summer to explore our generative AI-driven ambient technology in action. Join us Aug. 12-15 at the 2024 Solventum Client Experience Summit in Dallas to experience it in person.

Jared Sorensen is global vice president, clinician productivity solutions for Solventum.

Courtney Howell-McAnelly is a marketing communications specialist for Solventum.