InStride Health, a leading insurance-based provider of speciality anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) treatment for children, adolescents and young adults, in collaboration with The Wharton School's Health Care Management Department, today announced results of a case study showcasing the impact of an AI scribe in clinical settings to reduce administrative burden on providers. The case study, “Strategic AI in Practice: How InStride Health’s Clinical and Technical Partnership Drove Scribe Success,” provides an example of how to apply AI successfully within the context of a complex healthcare ecosystem. Specifically, the results illustrate how a collaborative approach between clinicians and technologists, combined with a responsible AI adoption model that prioritises disciplined governance designed to enable rapid innovation while maintaining clinical integrity, achieved a substantial reduction in clinical documentation burden and an improved clinician experience.

Clinicians face extensive documentation requirements, spending two hours documenting for every hour of patient care. That burden creates operational constraints, often resulting in fewer or delayed appointments, slower access for families, and increased after-work hours that can impact clinician well-being. With 82 per cent of clinicians in the US reporting burnout, the need for initiatives that can meaningfully reduce documentation burden and increase time available for direct patient care is growing.

InStride’s clinical and technology teams partnered to address this issue through an AI scribe initiative designed to make clinical evaluators more efficient and freer to focus more fully on face-to-face time with patients and caregivers. Following the AI scribe rollout:

88 per cent of clinical evaluators indicated that the scribe tool saved them at least 30 minutes daily

63 per cent of clinical evaluators indicated that the scribe tool saved them >1-2 hours daily

88 per cent of clinical evaluators reported the scribe tool allowed them to be more present in sessions with patients and families

100 per cent of clinical evaluators were still utilising the scribe tool 4 weeks following rollout

“AI can have a transformative impact on the clinician experience, but only if it is designed and implemented with real clinician workflows in mind,” said Kathryn Boger, PhD, ABPP, co-founder and chief clinical officer of InStride Health. “The results of our AI scribe work show that when implemented smartly, with clinician input at the forefront, AI tools help clinicians get time back to focus on patient care.”

InStride’s collaborative partnership model, in which clinicians and technologists co-design each step, has become InStride’s blueprint for responsible and ethical AI adoption. Because InStride opted to implement an off-the-shelf AI scribe, which met strict standards for data security, clinical relevance, ethical guidelines, and workflow fit, they were able to deploy rapidly while preserving flexibility for internal development in the future.