From tool to platform: The next phase of AI scribe adoption

Note: This is the second in a three-article series from DHI and Heidi Health on the next phase of AI scribe solutions and approaches. The first article explored AI scribes as clinical partners. This second piece looks at AI scribe as a platform instead of a standalone tool. The final article will look at how scribe technology benefits specific specialty healthcare providers. 

Few technologies have demonstrated their value to healthcare as quickly and effectively as artificial intelligence (AI) scribe tools. Clinicians can spend more time focusing on patient needs during visits and less time documenting those visits, especially during pajama time.

AI scribe tools offer a step up from human scribes, who are effective at capturing information but often lack the experience to understand medical nuances. Tools that plug directly into electronic health record (EHR) systems have proven especially valuable, as they let clinicians start documentation without leaving a familiar workflow.

However, standalone general-purpose tools can have their limitations, especially for large health systems who intend to deploy AI scribe tools across diverse care settings. As the example of Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH) illustrates, a clinician-centric approach to AI scribe adoption emphasizes letting end users discover where and how they’ll benefit from the technology over simply choosing a tool based on EHR integrations and product features.

Put clinicians in the driver’s seat

Like many organizations, Beth Israel sought a way to address the burden of documentation and other administrative tasks that contributes heavily to burnout. The health system opted to lean on the expertise of its 4,700-plus physicians and 39,000 employees, spread across urban hospitals as well as suburban practices, to drive adoption for the right care settings, specialties, and encounter types.

BILH offered 1,000 clinicians across three cohorts access to an AI scribe platform over a six-month period, with 760 enrolling. That figure is telling, as an adoption rate of 60% is typically needed for an AI scribe to deliver transformational value. Participants worked in the hospital and outpatient setting, with nearly 50 specialties represented.

The results of the trial captured in a user survey speak for themselves.

• 89% of clinicians were satisfied with the quality of their notes
• 90% felt more present and made more eye contact with their patients
• 82% experienced reduced cognitive load during their visit
• 74% reduced the time spent documenting outside normal work hours

Broadly, BILH also saw capacity gains equivalent to up to four additional patients per clinician per day. Not surprisingly, the organization is now in the process of rolling out the AI scribe platform to all clinics and integrating it with its incumbent EHR system.

Gain flexibility from a platform

The overwhelmingly positive response from BILH’s pilot shows the value of allowing clinicians to lead the way in deciding how new technology products should be used – especially when they’re as transformative to the clinical experience as an AI scribe. The results also illustrate why flexibility matters, and why platforms are positioned to unlock use cases that standalone tools cannot.

Not only did BILH need to support dozens of medical specialties. The organization’s footprint in New England also includes non-traditional care settings such as nursing homes and sub-acute rehabilitation. Clinicians also found unprompted uses for the platform’s flexibility once it was in their hands. In some cases, physicians used the AI scribe to support multilingual documentation, an application well beyond a typical scribe use case, and one nobody would have specified in an EHR integration checklist beforehand.

A health system with such breadth and depth of clinical services needs an AI scribe platform that includes templates purpose-built for the documentation needs of diverse use cases, as well as embedded clinical evidence and guidelines that can be tailored to specialties and care settings.

Flexibility is more than features, though. It also allows the conversation about EHR integration to shift. For many AI scribe tools, EHR integration is a necessary precursor to reaping the benefits of customizations or advanced features. That adds cost and complexity to implementation, which limits who is eligible to participate in pilots.

With a platform in place, the barrier to entry is lower. Health systems gain the flexibility to initially roll out an AI scribe wherever they see a need, whether it’s the large hospital or the small clinic. Full EHR integration can come later, when ROI has been proven – and clinical champions are touting the AI scribe’s benefits to their colleagues.

Reap benefits beyond the academic health system

AI scribe platform also can work for specialty care providers. This is the case for St. Cloud Orthopedics, which sits about an hour north of Minnesota’s Twin Cities and covers orthopedic subspecialties from shoulder to toe and offers urgent care, imaging, rehabilitation, and surgical services.

That range contributes to diverse documentation needs, and neither transcription nor dictation tools were up to the challenge. It took up to 10 days for notes to hit charts, and many contained glaring errors. Adopting an AI scribe platform cut turnaround time to a matter of hours while improving accuracy. Today, as many as 95% of encounters use the AI scribe platform’s outputs.

Taking advantage of a flexible platform also enabled St. Cloud Orthopedics to establish clear workflows and governance policies. Multiple users can contribute to the same note during a patient visit, which leads to clean handoffs. Templates remain versatile and contain conditional sections for exact wording that must be verified prior to documentation, such as procedures, medication doses, and consent forms. This means that notes meet clinical, billing, and compliance requirements, an important value proposition for the unique needs (and resource constraints) of specialty care settings.

BILH and St. Cloud Orthopedics sit at opposite ends of the health system spectrum: one a sprawling academic system with thousands of clinicians, the other a focused specialty practice. Yet both found the same thing: the real value of a platform isn’t just that it scales better than a tool, but how it bends toward whatever a health system actually needs, whether that’s an unplanned language use case or a governance workflow built around specialty-specific templates. That flexibility raises the next question: what happens when a platform gets pointed at the specific demands of a single specialty?

In the next article, we’ll look at how this same platform flexibility plays out inside individual specialties, including surgical, behavioral health, and rural care settings, each with documentation needs unlike any other.

About the Author

Nancy, Cibotti, MD, CMIO, Heidi  

Dr. Cibotti is a primary care physician with extensive experience in healthcare leadership and innovation. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and medical degree at Brown University. After her primary care residency at New York Hospital she returned to Boston and spent 20 years at Massachusetts General Hospital and on the teaching faculty at Harvard Medical School. Subsequently, Dr Cibotti joined Iora Health where she served as the Market Medical Director and opened 2 new primary care practices serving the needs of frail elders. In the past 8 years, she has held multiple roles at Beth Israel Lahey Health including Chief Innovation Officer of Primary Care and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer. Her accomplishments include launching BILH’s virtual primary care program, implementing ambient AI scribes and helping to lead a system wide Epic implementation. In January 2026, Dr. Cibotti joined Heidi Health as the US based Chief Medical Information Officer.  

About Heidi

Heidi is building an AI Care Partner to expand clinical capacity by supporting every stage of care delivery. In addition to its AI scribe, Heidi has also introduced Evidence, giving clinicians access to trusted medical research at the point of care. Heidi supports more than 2.7 million patient interactions each week in 110 languages from 190 countries. Learn more at heidihealth.com.