More than 30,000 health and tech professionals are meeting at the HIMSS conference in Orlando, Florida, this week, and “ambient clinical documentation” is the talk of the exhibition floor, according to CNBC.

Ambient clinical documentation allows doctors to consensually record their visits with patients, and the conversations are automatically transformed into clinical notes and summaries.

“Companies like Microsoft’s Nuance Communications, Abridge, and Suki have developed solutions with these capabilities, which they argue will help reduce doctors’ administrative workloads and prioritize meaningful connections with patients,” CNBC reported.

Administrative workloads are a major issue for clinicians across the U.S. health-care system, CNBC observed. A survey published by Athenahealth in February revealed that more than 90% of physicians report feeling burned out on a “regular basis,” largely because of the paperwork they are expected to complete.

More than 60% of doctors said they feel overwhelmed by clerical requirements and work an average of 15 hours per week outside their normal hours to keep up, the survey reported.

Administrative work has served as one of the first areas where health systems have seriously begun to explore applications of generative AI.

Microsoft’s Nuance unveiled its ambient clinical documentation tool Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express in a preview capacity last March. By September, the solution, now called DAX Copilot, was generally available. There are now more than 200 organizations using the technology, CNBC reported.

Dr. Christopher Sharp, chief medical information officer at Stanford Health Care and one of the physicians who tested DAX Copilot, said he thinks the tool saves him documentation time.

“The moment that that first document returns to you, and you see your own words and the patient’s own words being reflected directly back to you in a usable fashion, I would say that from that moment, you’re hooked,” Sharp told CNBC.

Companies that supply the technology claim they are saving some doctors as much as three hours a day in work.

Suki CEO Punit Soni said he founded Suki more than six years ago after assessing that there would be a need for a digital assistant to help doctors manage clinical documentation. Soni said Suki is now utilized by more than 30 specialties in around 250 health organizations nationwide. Six “large health systems” have gone live with Suki in the past two weeks, he added.

Soni said Suki is focused on deploying its technology at scale and exploring additional applications, like how ambient documentation could be used to assist nurses. He said customers should expect most major languages to be included in the product.

“There is so much that has to happen,” he said. “In the next decade, all of health-care tech is going to look completely different.”

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