Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF), a large urban academic medical center consisting of 23 hospitals and 276 outpatient locations employing approximately 80,000 caregivers worldwide, partnered with Ambience Healthcare to deploy an ambient AI scribe solution to over 4,000 ambulatory care clinicians in a 4-month time frame.
After its own internal evaluation of AI scribe products, CCF partnered with Ambience Healthcare to achieve shared goals: rapid deployment to over 4,000 clinicians within a 4-month period; co-evaluation and ongoing monitoring of value metrics such as utilization, documentation time, clinician satisfaction, and financial indicators; and future partnership opportunities for expansion beyond ambulatory care.
Following a pilot evaluation, enterprise-wide ambulatory care deployment began on March 10, 2025. The four-pillar framework was: governance, training and onboarding, support, and real-time learning.
Governance was multi-disciplinary, consisting of a vendor-health system partnership: an Executive Sponsor Group for central oversight, a Project Operating Council for on-the-ground management, and cross-functional groups for IT, RCM, Training and Communications, Clinical Product, and Outreach and Monitoring. Training and onboarding were structured in four contractual milestone waves (Wave 0 with pilot users, Wave 1 with 80% of target users especially primary care, Wave 2 with 10% specialty, Wave 3 with remaining 10% complex specialties). Clinician trainings were offered live virtually three times daily, with required training before tool access. Over 4,000 clinicians were trained and onboarded in just under 16 weeks.
Support was provided via direct channels including live mobile chat staffed with human support personnel 24/7. During rollout, CCF maintained rapid feedback loops fielding over 900 inquiries with an average response time of two minutes. Most inquiries were custom physical exam template requests, multi-clinician workflow configurations, draft corrections and content updates, and AI scribe policy questions.
Real-time learning channels included the support channels themselves, with rapid updates prioritised. Department chairs were empowered with dedicated dashboards showing their departments’ training and onboarding progress and identifying areas needing support. Amy Merlino, Abigail Blue, Eric Boose, Beth Meese, Jennifer Owens, and Jean Vickers authored the manuscript for Cleveland Clinic Foundation; Alisa Angeloff, Monica Arnold, RuiJun Chen, Madeline Grade, Phuong Anh Pham-Viernickel, and Benjamin Rosner authored for Ambience Healthcare.