Johns Hopkins Medicine reduces clinician documentation burden with ambient AI scribing across outpatient clinics

Clinicians at Johns Hopkins faced a growing documentation burden from the explosion of EHR content driven by regulatory requirements and workflow demands. Technology had, by many measures, harmed rather than helped clinician workflows, forcing providers to keep eyes on screens instead of patients during encounters.

Johns Hopkins deployed ambient AI scribing technology across multiple ambulatory and outpatient specialty clinics. The tool listens to clinical encounters via a smartphone app integrated with the EHR, then uses a large language model to generate a structured draft note based on the spoken conversation, which the clinician reviews and edits for accuracy.

Clinicians report meaningfully improved patient interactions — they can maintain eye contact, hold open conversations, and remove hands from the keyboard during visits. Physicians including Dr. Hasselfeld use the tool in active clinical practice. The deployment spans multiple specialty areas with evaluation of multiple products underway.

• Ambient AI is most impactful as a 'hands-off-keyboard' tool that restores the human side of clinical encounters, not just a documentation shortcut.
• Using the clinician's own smartphone as the listening device lowers friction for adoption.
• Multiple competing products are being evaluated in parallel to understand different functionality tiers.