UT Health San Antonio has moved steadily bet on ambient AI documentation as a strategy for giving clinicians time back in their day. Walter Fink, DO, the system’s associate vice president and chief medical officer, told Becker’s that the technology is already changing how visits feel for both sides of the exam table.
“We’re using some ambient technology to allow notes to get done, which is reducing pajama time, reducing stress and strain on providers. And I think it translates into better quality for the patients, because they’re getting more face time with their doctors instead of the doctors and the providers looking at a computer and typing,” he said. “They’re really having a more interactive experience, which then in turn makes that visit go better, and that activates the patient to actually be more engaged in their healthcare.”
But getting there wasn’t a matter of simply turning the technology on. Dr. Fink said adoption broke down the way it typically does with many systems, with a small group of early adopters moving fast, while most physicians needed more convincing and more support.
“It’s tough, like any rollout of technology — you’ve got early adopters, you’ve got late adopters, you’ve got folks that are in the middle,” Dr. Fink said. “There’s a small subset of our physicians and providers who are very technologically savvy and just leaned right into it and got it.”
That pattern echoed what UT Health San Antonio had already learned from its Epic rollout. Dr. Fink said the lesson from that experience shaped how the system approached ambient AI from the start.
“Just as we saw with the Epic transition and everything we’ve done in the past, when we roll out a new technology, it really is elbow-to-elbow support that allows that technology to become successful and adopted,” Dr. Fink said. “The more we engaged our folks on an individual level, and the more one-to-one, or one-to-small-group educationals we had, the better off we were. We’re getting some significant traction now, and there’s a better proportion of our notes that are getting done via ambient technology.”
Dr. Fink said that traction built on itself once enough physicians had a positive experience to talk about. Peer credibility, he said, did more to move skeptical colleagues than any top-down communication could.
“Word of mouth from clinicians having success with it is really helpful,” Dr. Fink said. “There’s that peer pressure concept, right, that maybe applies a little bit. It just reinforces in my mind the importance of, you can’t just write an email and send pictures out and expect people to adopt that new technology. You really have to be there to help them get through it, because everything is unknown. What happens if I make a mistake? If I go down this rabbit trail and I can’t get out of it, what do I do? How am I going to get support for that?”
That need for hands-on reassurance is why UT Health San Antonio put its chief medical information officer and associate CMIO directly into the training process alongside dedicated trainers, rather than treating rollout as a one-time onboarding event.
“Having our CMIO and our associate CMIO out there, with trainers, training people how to use it, has made a big difference,” Dr. Fink said.
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