Do AI scribes help health systems save time?

You’re reading the web edition of STAT’s Health Tech newsletter, our guide to how technology is transforming the life sciences. Sign up to get it delivered in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.

Earlier this week, the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) issued a report that assesses health systems’ experience with AI ambient scribes so far and zeroing in on the technology’s “financial and operational implications.” The report says about 60 scribes are adopted in the market, and while many pitch themselves as time savers, the PHTI finds that evidence of time savings is limited. The report also explores how scribes may result in higher health care costs. My colleague Brittany Trang brings us this cheat sheet:

• PHTI made some great tables summarizing the companies in the AI scribe space and the studies that have been conducted so far on them. But if you’re short on time, skip to the “Looking Ahead” section on page 28, which covers the basics: Health systems adopt AI scribes to address provider burnout, which is why hardly anyone has put any effort into measuring any other sort of return on investment. But as the technology gets more popular, health systems will need to justify the spending. 
• The report warns in multiple places that AI tools could increase costs in several ways: “On the one hand, enhanced documentation quality could lead to higher reimbursements, potentially offsetting expenses — but also leading to unintended downstream consequences for patients and the market overall. On the other hand, the cumulative costs of the software may be greater than any savings achieved through improved efficiency, reduced administrative burden, or reduced clinician attrition,” write the authors.
• PHTI notes that the industry “is grappling with the immense potential of these tools and the evolving understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Critically, there is a need for more standardized methodologies and metrics to understand performance across a range of indicators and for more research to understand their long-term impact on efficiency.” The chart above describes some metrics that might be used in evaluation as well as an early look at what the evidence tells us today.

‘Black boxy’ telehealth-pharma partnerships

As drugmakers like Pfizer and Eli Lilly turn to telehealth platforms as a way to get their treatments to patients, the practice is drawing scrutiny from  Senators who want to determine whether the relationships violate the federal anti-kickback statute. But the deals also caught the eye of academics Ateev Mehrotra, Olivier Wouters, and Erin Fuse Brown. In a new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Brown University researchers explore how the partnerships might increase access to care but may also lead to inappropriate prescribing.