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Fletcher Allen Health Care\u2019s Dr. Daniel Peters demonstrates how the Burlington hospital uses AI to help diagnose patients on Wednesday, April 22, 2026. Photo by Glenn Russell\/VTDigger<\/p>\nFletcher Allen Health Care\u2019s Dr. Daniel Peters demonstrates how the Burlington hospital uses AI to help diagnose patients on Wednesday, April 22, 2026. Photo by Glenn Russell\/VTDigger<\/p>\n
Dr. Dan Peters typically spends a shift in the emergency department dashing from patient to patient with a running list in his mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need to order meds for a patient. I need to order imaging studies. I need to call a consultant about a patient,\u201d the ER doctor at UVM Medical Center described. \u201cAnd on that task list is (that) I need to write a note about this patient.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo some extent, that task is a bigger task than everything else,\u201d Peters said of writing a medical note. The note is a simple yet major part of doctoring that most patients hardly ever see. But for physicians, it looms large.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need to write a note that summarizes why this patient was here, what we did and what we thought about what\u2019s going on or what wasn\u2019t going on,\u201d Peters said.<\/p>\n
Medical notewriting is quickly changing for doctors across specialties with the advent of AI scribe technology. It\u2019s been essential to reducing the burden of paperwork and the high levels of clinician burnout that result from it. Still, some worry about how to afford the expensive technology and about the risks of over-reliance on it for medical decision-making.<\/p>\n
With an AI scribe, Peters begins his exams by asking his patient for consent and then hitting record on an iPhone. He asks questions and does a physical exam, narrating everything he\u2019s seeing, feeling and thinking. All the while, his phone is listening.<\/p>\n
When he stops recording, the AI scribe has cast the conversation into a full note \u2014 replete with the patient history, visit synopsis, exam results and medical decision-making, each separated into its own section.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Peters, it has been game changing.<\/p>\n
Existential exhaustion<\/p>\n
Primary care providers describe the same thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2024, the University of Vermont Health network started to use Abridge, an AI scribe, as an initiative to reduce clinician burnout. A study of the implementation<\/a> found that 69% of the 50 participating primary care providers reported burnout before using the technology. After four months, only 24% reported burnout. After one year, that number leveled off to 36%.<\/p>\n It mirrors national trends: A report from the medical technology company Doximity<\/a> found that more than 36% of clinicians who use AI see it reducing the amount of time that they spend working outside regular hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n That same report found that of 3,151 physicians surveyed in the U.S., 54% use AI technology in some way in their practice.\u00a0The most frequent use, Doximity found, is in doing a literature search (that\u2019s 35% of those using it). The second most popular use is for AI scribe technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Anne Morris, a family medicine physician at UVM Health and the associate dean of Lerner College\u2019s primary care residency, described how profoundly the technology has lessened the psychological weight of doctors\u2019 never-ending administrative to-do list.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou can know that you\u2019ve seen patients for the last nine hours and done some really important things. It\u2019s the knowledge that you then have to spend three more hours documenting it that is exhausting. It can almost be like, \u2018Well, I put all that work in, but it\u2019s never enough,\u2019\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, using the Abridge technology has become second nature. It has whittled down the amount of work time that spills out of normal clinic hours and into the evenings \u2014 what she called \u201cpajama time.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt helps to take away some of that existential exhaustion,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But she\u2019s also seen it adding to the quality of her visits with patients, in ways that also seem to stave off burnout.<\/p>\n It\u2019s changing the ways providers communicate, she said. There is no laptop propping up a barrier between the patient and provider, and there is not the same pressure to rush through a visit to get to the next one.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you can sit and fully give your attention to your patients and not have to worry about, \u2018Did I document that correctly?\u2019\u2026 The visit itself has more meaning,\u201d Morris said. \u201cThat is what helps to bring that sense of fulfillment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the emergency department, Peters has felt the same thing: The technology has driven him to articulate his thoughts more clearly and talk his patients through his decisions even more than before, he said. There\u2019s this underlying incentive that, the more he communicates aloud, the easier his documentation will be later.\u00a0<\/p>\n Medical decision-making\u00a0<\/p>\n Peters sees the glimmers of how using an AI scribe could improve the scope of care he can give. As an emergency medicine doctor, he said, he needs to be something of a generalist, prepared to field a little of everything and anything. But, a large language model can hold a generalist\u2019s breath of knowledge, with a specialist\u2019s depth of detail.\u00a0<\/p>\n Recently, he had a patient with an unusual pathology. As the patient described the symptoms, the AI scribe suggested a syndrome that Peters hadn\u2019t known the name for. When Peters looked it up in a separate medical database, it was exactly what the patient was experiencing.\u00a0<\/p>\n This type of diagnostic suggestion is still limited, he said, and still requires a level of gut-checking, but he is sanguine about what that power of suggestion could mean in the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere is more knowledge in these (large language models) than could ever be consumed by a human being,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n But at the same time, the work of distilling and understanding complex cases and crafting medical decisions is the art of the trade that gives him, and many doctors like him, fulfillment. He does not want to lose that.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Morris, too, worries about building an overreliance on AI for clinical decision-making, especially for her residents.<\/p>\n For the first six months of the residency, she said, the training doctors have to do all their notes by hand to learn the skill of creating an assessment without any artificial suggestion. She hopes that practice gives them the ability to check AI once they do begin using it.<\/p>\n Broader Applications<\/p>\n At UVM Health, AI technology has made its way into the exam room beyond scribing, in narrower applications. Dr. Justin Stinnett-Donnelly, who works as the hospital group\u2019s chief health information officer and in internal medicine at Central Vermont and Porter medical centers, described how useful AI is in radiology. One tool, called Gleamer, uses AI algorithms to analyze X-Rays and highlight fractures.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Another, CathWorks, analyzes blood pressure and flow around the heart. Without it, doctors physically insert a wire with pressure monitors on either end to get a measurement. The use of the imaging technology, he said, prevents invasive surgery and saves money while achieving the goal.\u00a0<\/p>\n In his work at Central Vermont Medical Center, Stinnett-Donnelly uses a band placed around a patient\u2019s head that uses an AI algorithm to monitor whether their brain activity follows the patterns of a seizure. He uses it to gauge whether a patient can safely stay at CVMC, in Berlin, or needs to be transferred to the higher acuity medical center in Burlington.<\/p>\n The network also uses AI technology, Stinnett-Donnelly said, for \u201cback office work\u201d \u2014\u00a0 like matching care with the right billing codes.\u00a0<\/p>\n He sees it as a way to cut down all the paperwork that exists in the healthcare system between the moments where a patient is sitting in an exam room talking to their doctor.\u00a0<\/p>\n Stinnett-Donnelly leads a group at UVM Health that guides the implementation of AI in the clinical space. The ethics, cost and security of the technology are concerns the group does not take lightly. Stinnett-Donnelly hopes that comes across to patients, especially the importance of privacy.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a real fear,\u201d he said, \u201cand we do everything we can to respect individual autonomy and decision-making.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Anecdotally, it\u2019s rare that patients do not consent to doctors using the AI technology, he said. Morris and Peters agreed. The scribe does not save the recording and then its notes go directly into the electronic medical record that the network has been using for years. Morris said that the process ensures the notes are as secure as the medical record itself<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, these scribes embedded into the electronic health records can be so much more expensive \u2014\u00a0 often prohibitively so for independent practices that are not connected to a big institution, like UVM Health.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rick Dooley is a family practice physician assistant at Thomas Chittenden Health Center in Williston. He\u2019s emphatic about how important AI scribe technology has been in his independent primary care practice. He uses a medical AI scribe, called Heidi, in almost the same way as Morris uses Abridge in her primary care practice \u2014 except, Dooley has to transfer the scribe\u2019s note into the medical record, rather than having it already embedded within it.<\/p>\n