The note that sits between doctor and patient
In a modern exam room, part of every visit goes to a screen, because the note has to be written somewhere. At the Permanente Medical Group, part of Kaiser Permanente, an AI scribe now listens to the visit and drafts the note. The doctor reads, edits and signs it. The group evaluated the result across 7,260 physicians and more than 2.5 million encounters over 63 weeks.
The number that gets quoted
Time. An estimated 15,791 hours of documentation saved in a year, equivalent to 1,794 eight-hour working days. It is large, and the study reports reductions in documentation time, not where those hours went.
The number a patient could feel
Of patients surveyed, 47% said their doctor spent less time looking at the computer and 39% said their doctor spent more time speaking directly to them. Among physicians, 84% reported a positive effect on how they communicated with patients. The evaluation was run by the organization that deployed the scribes, and the figures here come from two summaries of the paper, not the paper itself.
What stayed with the doctor
The scribe diagnosed nothing. It removed the task standing between the doctor and the patient and left the reading, the judgment and the signature where they were.
Why the second number is the useful one
A time saving is an organizational number; it gets credited to a budget. The looking-up number belongs to the patient, because it changes what a visit feels like. When both come from the same tool, the second is better evidence that the task was the right one to take away, because it shows up in the part of the job the person cares about most.
Most jobs carry a note of their own: a required task between a capable person and the work they were hired to do. It is often a better first target for AI than the work people take pride in. Ask your team what theirs is.
The study also keeps its limits visible: the evaluation came from the organization that deployed the scribes, and the survey sample size was not in the summaries. Both are reasons to read the percentages as indicative.
Naming the task is the first step: Name the required task that crowds out your team's real work →
Keep reading: Five hours a week came back. Nobody said where they should go. · The saving and the cost belong to two different people
This is the thinking behind a Trusted AI Culture.
Sources: Permanente Medical Group, "Ambient Artificial Intelligence Scribes: Learnings after 1 Year and over 2.5 Million Uses," NEJM Catalyst, April 2025, as reported by the American Medical Association and the Permanente Federation.
Written with AI in the loop: my idea, AI drafted and sharpened, my judgment on the way out. Every word is mine to stand behind. — Darren