Ambient Artificial Intelligence based scribes that create visit notes based on the conversation in the room during patient evaluation may save documentation time and reduce total time in the health record but may not perform as well as human scribes in some circumstances, at least for pediatric patient charts.
Additional Information
Two side-by-side reports in the May Annals of Emergency Medicine portray related but slightly different pictures of ambient scribing.
Preiksaitis et al found that the offer of an ambient AI scribing system led to some adoption more for lower acuity visits. AI use led to shorter notes, shorter electronic health record time, and about one minute less documentation time per chart. Morey et al compared human and AI scribes and found that human scribes were associated with similar note lengths and metrics for adult patients and somewhat higher quality charts in pediatric patients. An associated editorial argues that AI charting may offer a moment of culture change. (I am one of the authors of the editorial.)
References
Preiksaitis C, Alvarez A, Winkel M, et al. Ambient Artificial Intelligence Scribe Adoption and Documentation Time in the Emergency Department. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2026; 87, 569-574.
Morey J, Jones D, Walker L, et al. Ambient Artificial Intelligence Versus Human Scribes in the Emergency Department. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2025; 87, 561-568.
Schriger D, Schenkel S. Can Ambient Charting Fix Emergency Medicine? Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2026; 87, 575-577.
