Healthcare leaders are under tremendous pressure to improve clinician experience while protecting productivity. When a new technology or initiative shows promise, the natural instinct is to scale it across the organization.
AI scribes are a perfect example.
In just a few years, they’ve gone from pilot projects to enterprise-wide deployments. And for many clinicians, they’ve been transformative – reducing documentation burden, decreasing after-hours charting, and giving time back to patient care. Recent studies have shown meaningful reductions in EHR documentation time, particularly for clinicians with heavier documentation workloads.
But here’s the question we should be asking:
Are AI scribes the right solution for every clinician?
The answer is “not always.”
This month’s Sisi’s Signals looks at data from over 900 clinicians’ AI scribe deployment.
At first glance, the rollout looks like a tremendous success, and it was for many clinicians. But a deeper look tells a more nuanced story.
While nearly 8 in 10 clinicians activated the technology, only about half became active users who used it for more than 3 months. Among those clinicians, the average time savings increased from about 88 hours to approximately 115 hours per year.
The lesson isn’t that AI scribes don’t work. In fact, they do. They saved even more hours than the average across all clinicians who activated the scribe.
The takeaway is that even highly successful initiatives don’t benefit everyone equally. Some clinicians struggle with documentation and after-hours charting. Others don’t.
Some readily adopt new technology. Others prefer different workflows.
Some departments may see dramatic gains, while others experience little measurable impact.
The same principle applies to every workforce initiative, whether it’s AI scribes, flexible scheduling, wellness programs, leadership development, or workflow redesign. Retention requires more than a single lever.
The most effective retention strategies begin with understanding where strain exists, who is experiencing it, and why.
That’s exactly what Clinician Retention Intelligence (CRI) is designed to do.
Rather than assuming one initiative should be applied uniformly, CRI helps leaders identify the clinicians, teams, and departments most likely to benefit from a specific intervention, allowing organizations to match the right solution to the right problem at the right time. Our guide on how to evaluate the efficacy of workforce initiatives delves into this.
Successful retention isn’t about implementing more programs. It’s about implementing the right programs for the clinicians who need them.