Hard vs. Soft: The Real ROI of Ambient AI to CIOs

Seattle Children's Hospital CIO Zafar Chaudry says an enterprise-wide deployment of a new tool will save millions in recruitment and retention costs, not to mention reducing stress and burnout and improving the clinical encounter.

The value of an ambient AI solution is often thought of in terms of soft ROI. But Zafar Chaudry sees some very solid savings – as in millions of dollars – when you figure out the true benefit of reduced clinician burnout and stress.

“Recruitment and retention is the value proposition,” says the SVP, Chief Digital Officer and Chief AI and Information Officer at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “It’s really hard to train clinicians, and [pediatric care] is a very expensive specialty.”

Dozens of specialties, to be exact. Seattle Children’s recently partnered with Abridge to expand an ambient AI platform across 18 of those pediatric specialties, giving doctors a tool designed to capture their interactions and transcribe the relevant data into the medical record.

For Chaudry, the tool very specifically targets clinician stress and burnout, buttressing the hospital against the rising tide of workforce depletion and hiring challenges. And that, to him, is as valuable as the improved clinical outcomes it will eventually produce.

“If we have 15% turnover, we can bring that down to 8% for every physician we don't lose and we retain,” he says. “And if we hire a new physician, it's a year's worth of work before they're really embedded in the health system. And a year's salary of a physician could be quite hard.”

“So we're doing this a lot from a recruitment, retention, [and] cost avoidance potential,” he continues. “And that's how we're justifying this: If you spend X amount and you can keep three docs … that's $3 million you didn't spend [along with] the recruitment process. We use an external company. They charge us 30% of the first year's salary just to find a person for you. So that's 300K a pop in money you would spend trying to find replacements because people left because you didn't give them the tools.”

“Even if you're bringing in $100K a year per specialty, and we have so many specialties, that's already millions,” Chaudry continues. “So the product is going to easily pay for itself over a three-year period. I would suspect in three years it's going to be cost-neutral and in five years it’s going to be positive.”

Measuring Clinical, RCM Benefits

The enterprise-wide expansion of the Abridge platform comes after a successful 90-day, 50-clinician pilot, during which those clinicians reported a 79% average reduction in documentation – a key pain point for any clinician wanting to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in front of the patient.

Chaudry says 83% of the clinicians involved in the pilot were “more than satisfied” with the ability of the technology to accurately capture the encounter, and 75% saw improvements in the quality of data-capture. They were especially impressed by the tool’s ability to catch pediatric-specific terms and transcribe accurately.

Now, the value of a good AI tool for clinicians is of course far more than reduced stress and burnout. Noting that it will take at least 12 months of data to measure the benefits, Chaudry sees  the ROI for revenue cycle management in a tool that also mines the clinical encounter for coding opportunities, leading to improved reimbursements.

As well, the AI tool creates a standardized process for transcription, allowing the hospital to move away from the challenges associated with each clinician’s note-taking style.

“Some of our clinicians like to write 15 pages of notes and some of them write half a page, and it's really hard to get that consistency,” Chaudry notes, adding that the hospital hopes to have at least 80% of its clinicians on the platform.

Then there are the well-documented clinical and patient benefits. Taking clinicians away from the computer means they’re in front of the patient – or, in this case, the patient, the patient’s family and caregivers, grandparents and siblings, all of which can offer clues to clinical care and opportunities to improve that care. That benefits the clinician as well as patient engagement and satisfaction.

With an average of only 10-12 minutes per patient, Chaudry says, that time has to be given more value.

“This gives you more clinically focused patient time, and that's super important to our docs,” he says. “It also gives you an overall better patient experience because, you know, as a patient, I don't like watching people's backs.”