Of the 1 in 5 U.S. adults with at least one mental health condition, fewer than 40% receive any care. Wait lists for psychiatrists are often 2 to 5 months long.
But it’s not just patients who are feeling the imbalance of supply and demand.
The prevalence of unstructured practice notes in behavioral health means that clinicians are increasingly encumbered by documentation overload, often spending 1.5 to 2 hours on charting for every 6 to 8 sessions.
While groups like the American Medical Association (AMA) have suggested a number of pathways to improve efficiency, from leveraging telehealth to adopting team-based collaborative care models, more is needed to close care gaps.
The problem with traditional approaches is that they barely address the issue at the heart of care access: a lack of time.
Transforming unstructured notes from a patient encounter into a cohesive, compliant document is time consuming, and few technologies have delivered on their promise of greater efficiencies. Unfortunately, providers’ unique note-taking styles have not been reliably replicated. Until now.
Organizations like Indiana Health Group (IHG), a large multi-specialty behavioral health practice based in Carmel, have turned to clinical AI specifically designed to replicate the provider’s documentation style.
While the 60-provider group benefitted from being an early adopter of EHRs, IHG providers found that the practice of inputting notes directly into the EHR during a patient visit hindered the patient experience. So many providers would opt to document care after hours.
”I had to choose between having a crappy note or sacrificing the face-to-face experience with patients," recalled Dr. Chris Bojrab, IHG's president. "I'd either be madly typing to capture everything or trying to stay present while knowing my documentation would suffer.”
Since implementing Heidi’s ambient AI scribe, the dynamic at IHG shifted.
Within five months of deploying clinical AI throughout its network, IHG’s providers had achieved an average reduction of two hours per day in documentation work, said Bojrab. This adds up to $200k in clinical time per year.
IHG’s experience is not isolated.
According to a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine, AI scribes continue to demonstrate efficacy in reducing physician workload, in aggregate producing estimated time savings in documentation of more than 15,700 hours for users — equivalent to 1,794 working days — compared with nonusers, over 1 year of use.
For behavioral health providers, this time savings potentially expands access. A psychologist can see a few more patients in a week. And the quality of the clinician-patient encounter is better.
“It allows me to build a better note but at the same time actually talk to my patient more conversationally,” Bojrab said. “I can imagine that for a lot of practices, this will allow you to better document things so you can capture more reimbursement. Honestly for us, it's mainly a quality of life thing."
Learn more about using Heidi in behavioral health.
