Cleveland Clinic Adopts Ambient AI Scribes for Documentation

The Cleveland Clinic conducted a structured pilot of ambient AI scribe systems during 2024, placing roughly 250 physicians into test cohorts that evaluated five vendor platforms on accuracy, user experience and clinical documentation quality, according to Business Insider and the AHA. The organization tested systems across more than 80 specialties and subspecialties and engaged about 25 to 35 clinicians per vendor in pilot runs lasting three to five months, the AHA reports. After the head-to-head evaluation the health system selected Ambience and unveiled an exclusive five-year partnership at ViVE 2025, per FierceHealthcare and the AHA. FierceHealthcare and Business Insider report the platform was rolled out in phases to US ambulatory clinicians beginning in spring 2025; Business Insider says clinicians were offered training but not required to adopt the tool.

Per FierceHealthcare, Ambience's platform performs documentation capture from recorded encounters and applies AI for clinical documentation, clinical documentation integrity and point-of-care coding. The AHA describes the pilot assessment as using Epic data, provider surveys, patient feedback and technical evaluations to compare vendor output. A separate study led by Yale New Haven Health and published in JAMA Network Open, cited by Becker's Behavioral Health, found that among 272 clinicians who used an ambient AI scribe for 30 days, self-reported burnout declined from about 52% to 39%, and after-hours documentation fell by nearly one hour per week; Becker's notes those results were based on surveys rather than EHR time logs.

Editorial analysis - industry patterns: Health systems increasingly run head-to-head pilots to compare ambient scribe products because documentation quality, specialty coverage and EHR integration vary considerably across vendors. Observers have framed Cleveland Clinic's approach as unusually comprehensive, testing multiple vendors across dozens of specialties and tying evaluations to both objective EHR data and provider surveys, which other systems use to de-risk multi-year vendor commitments. Reporting highlights clinician experience as a major purchase criterion: Business Insider quotes Rohit Chandra, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Cleveland Clinic, saying, "For providers, it's great because you get an excellent draft with little effort," and Eric Boose, M.D., the physician lead on the pilot, noting clinicians not in the pilot asked to join the program.

Editorial analysis - operational patterns: Ambient AI scribes aim to shift clinician time away from typing and toward patient-facing work by producing draft notes and after-visit summaries; FierceHealthcare and Business Insider describe features such as automated summaries and coding assistance. Becker's Behavioral Health includes clinician testimony that the tools feel "transformative" and "liberating," quoting Leopoldo Pozuelo, M.D., center director of adult behavioral health at Cleveland Clinic. The JAMA Network Open study cited by Becker's suggests short-term clinician-reported improvements in burnout and documentation time, but that study used self-reported measures rather than confirmed EHR log reductions.

Editorial analysis - indicators for observers: Practitioners and health IT teams should monitor:

• •objective EHR time-log changes versus self-reported gains
• •documentation accuracy and downstream coding/revenue effects
• •specialty-specific performance where clinical language and workflow differ
• •patient notification and consent processes for ambient recording
• •interoperability with EHRs such as Epic, which Cleveland Clinic used in its evaluations, per the AHA piece. Regulators, payers and professional societies may also focus on documentation provenance and auditing when AI-generated notes are adopted widely

The Cleveland Clinic's multi-vendor pilot and subsequent selection of Ambience provide a concrete example of how a large health system evaluates ambient scribe products at scale. Reporting across Business Insider, FierceHealthcare, Becker's and the AHA emphasizes empirical evaluation, clinician experience and phased rollout rather than immediate mandatory adoption; the JAMA Network Open study cited by Becker's suggests potential near-term clinician benefits but relies on self-reported outcomes.