Graham Walker, MD, knows what it’s like to experience burnout. He’s familiar with feeling “mental fatigue” during his shifts.

“We spend so much time not just documenting [patient experiences], but constantly juggling clinical data, decision-making, and administrative tasks,” said Dr. Walker, an emergency physician with Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco. “That load accumulates across a shift and by hour 10, the decision[-making] and cognitive fatigue are real.”

But Dr. Walker recently got some help with the demands of his job, thanks to a system-wide change made by the hospital system that employs him—the rollout of an ambient artificial intelligence (AI) scribe program. “Offloading the charting to a scribe helps reduce that cognitive friction, so I’m not finishing each shift totally depleted,” Dr. Walker said.

Higher Burnout Odds

Even among their fellow doctors, emergency physicians are particularly susceptible to burnout. A recent study surveyed U.S. physicians and analyzed measures like emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (a lack of feeling towards patients).¹ After adjusting for personal and professional factors, the researchers found emergency physicians had three times the odds of burnout compared with those in other specialties. Emergency physicians were also half as likely to be satisfied with their work-life balance.

“Work hours are a strong predictor of burnout in these models,” said lead author Tait Shanafelt, MD, chief wellness officer at Stanford Medicine. However, emergency physicians remained at an elevated risk of burnout even after accounting for hours.

Moreover, since at least 2011—when Dr. Shanafelt first began looking at questions related to job stress and life satisfaction—burnout among the physician population overall hasn’t budged much; despite coming down from its COVID-19–era height, burnout levels remain concerningly high.

AI Assistance

AI scribes like those now in use at Kaiser seem to be a promising way to alleviate some of the stress, as substantiated by several pilot programs and at least one wide-reaching new report.

Whether administrative technologies could make a real difference in health care settings interested the leaders of the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI)—an independent nonprofit initiative that evaluates technological health care innovations. To address the question, PHTI assembled a task force, which met first in September 2024, to consider both data and anecdotal feedback on AI scribe use. In a March report, the PHTI group pointed to broad evidence that the technology helps with stress.² Clinicians in a scribe pilot program conducted by MultiCare Health System—a not-for-profit health care organization that operates in and around Washington state—reported a 63 percent reduction in burnout and their peers at Boston-based Mass General Brigham reported a 40 percent reduction. Moreover, 79 percent of the Mass General Brigham physicians surveyed noted that by using ambient scribes, they were able to give more attention to their patients. More than two-thirds of those at MultiCare similarly said that the technology led to better interactions with their patients.