The Effect of Ambient Listening Technology on the Patient Experience

Ambient listening tools utilize generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create clinical notes from real-time conversations between clinicians and patients during an encounter. One of the potential benefits of ambient listening tools is an improvement in reported patient experience.This study aimed to compare the patient experience of an outpatient visit during which an ambient listening tool is used with a standard visit and to quantify any perceived improvements in care.Patients completed a targeted survey following outpatient clinic visits across all departments at a large academic institution. We conducted ordered logistic regression analyses to examine the association between ambient scribe use and patient satisfaction across six survey domains: provider communication, provider attention, perceived time spent with the provider, overall interaction with the provider, understanding of health information, and quality of the after-visit summary.Our analysis included 8,120 patients who submitted a survey following their outpatient visit in February to April 2025. Patients whose provider used an ambient scribe had higher odds of reporting satisfaction with the perceived duration of time spent with the provider (OR = 1.13, 95% CI: 1.01-1.26, p = 0.033).In this observational study, use of an ambient AI scribe was associated with a small improvement in one patient-reported satisfaction domain of perceived attention from the provider and no detectable differences across other domains assessing patient experience. These findings suggest that, in early real-world implementation, ambient AI documentation tools may be acceptable to patients and do not appear to adversely affect perceived visit quality.