AI Ambient Scribe in Psychiatry (AASP)

August 18, 2026 updated by: Maja Dobelsek, MD, Psychiatrie St. Gallen

Evaluating the Use of an Artificial Intelligence Ambient Scribe in a Swiss Psychiatric Clinic: Efficiency, Documentation Quality, and Therapeutic Alliance

The goal of this clinical trial is to learn if an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that listens to appointments and drafts clinical notes can help clinicians in psychiatric care. Researchers also want to know if the tool changes how patients experience their care. The study includes mental health care providers (physicians, psychologists/psychotherapists, nurses, and social workers) at Psychiatrie St. Gallen and the adult patients they see in their appointments.

The main questions it aims to answer are:

  • Does the AI tool lower the time clinicians spend writing notes?
  • Are notes written with the AI tool as good as or better than notes written without it?
  • Do patients notice a difference in their relationship with their clinician when the tool is used?

Researchers will compare clinicians who use the AI tool to clinicians who keep writing notes their usual way, before and during the intervention period, to see if writing time, note quality, and the patient-rated therapeutic relationship differ between the two groups.

Clinicians will:

Join one of two groups. One group starts using the AI tool on August 14, 2026. The other group keeps writing notes the usual way. Both groups will be observed until the end of November 2026, with note quality evaluation completed in December 2026. Clinicians who cannot contribute to all measurements may, with their consent, remain in the study for automated measurement of documentation time only.

Patients will:

  • Be invited to fill out a short, anonymous survey about their experience with their clinician.
  • Be asked to agree, in writing, that researchers may review the report from their initial assessment appointment.

Study Overview

Status

Status

Indicates the current recruitment status or the expanded access status.
Active, not recruiting

Conditions

Conditions

The disease, disorder, syndrome, illness, or injury that is being studied. On ClinicalTrials.gov, conditions may also include other health-related issues, such as lifespan, quality of life, and health risks.

Intervention / Treatment

Intervention / Treatment

A process or action that is the focus of a clinical study. Interventions include drugs, medical devices, procedures, vaccines, and other products that are either investigational or already available. Interventions can also include noninvasive approaches, such as education or modifying diet and exercise.

Study Type

Study Type

Describes the nature of a clinical study. Study types include interventional studies (also called clinical trials), observational studies (including patient registries), and expanded access.
Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

Enrollment

The number of participants in a clinical study. The "anticipated" enrollment is the target number of participants that the researchers need for the study.
47

Phase

Phase

The stage of a clinical trial studying a drug or biological product, based on definitions developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The phase is based on the study's objective, the number of participants, and other characteristics. There are five phases: Early Phase 1 (formerly listed as Phase 0), Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, and Phase 4. Not Applicable is used to describe trials without FDA-defined phases, including trials of devices or behavioral interventions.
  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • Switzerland
    • Canton of St. Gallen
      • Heerbrugg, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 9435
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen
      • Pfäfers Dorf, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 7312
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen
      • Rorschach, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 9400
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen
      • Sankt Gallen, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 9000
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen
      • Sargans, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 7320
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen
      • Uznach, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 8730
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen
      • Wattwil, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 9630
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen
      • Wil, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 9500
        • Psychiatrie St. Gallen

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

The key requirements that people who want to participate in a clinical study must meet or the characteristics they must have. Eligibility criteria consist of both inclusion criteria (which are required for a person to participate in the study) and exclusion criteria (which prevent a person from participating). Types of eligibility criteria include whether a study accepts healthy volunteers, has age or age group requirements, or is limited by sex.

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Adult
  • Older Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Description

The observed study population comprises mental health care providers (physicians, psychologists/psychotherapists, nurses, and social workers) employed at Psychiatrie St. Gallen.

Provider Inclusion Criteria:

  • Readiness to use an artificial intelligence ambient scribe during patient consultations (intervention group)
  • Regular clinical consultations with adult psychiatric patients

Two outcome-specific criteria apply: contribution to the report quality outcomes requires that the provider regularly conducts new-patient intakes and writes initial psychiatric assessment reports; contribution to the patient-reported outcomes requires working in the outpatient setting. Providers who cannot or no longer wish to contribute to any actively collected outcome may, with their consent, remain enrolled for passive documentation-time measurement only; for analysis, such providers stay in the group which was fixed at enrollment..

Provider Exclusion Criteria:

  • notice of termination of the employment contract given during the data collection period
  • Working in the dementia inpatient clinic

Patients are not the observed population, but anonymous ratings of their subjective consultation experience are collected from them, and written consent for the review of initial assessment reports is obtained.

Patient Inclusion Criteria:

- All adult patients visiting the outpatient clinic during the data collection periods for a consultation with a participating provider

Patient Exclusion Criteria:

  • Insufficient German proficiency (below level B2)
  • Cognitive impairment precluding informed participation
  • Acute psychosis, acute suicidality, mania, or intoxication
  • Severe emotional distress

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Health Services Research
  • Allocation: Non-Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: Single

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm

Participant Group / Arm

A group or subgroup of participants in a clinical trial that receives a specific intervention/treatment, or no intervention, according to the trial's protocol.
Intervention / Treatment

Intervention / Treatment

A process or action that is the focus of a clinical study. Interventions include drugs, medical devices, procedures, vaccines, and other products that are either investigational or already available. Interventions can also include noninvasive approaches, such as education or modifying diet and exercise.
No Intervention: Control Group
The mental health care providers (physicians, psychologists/psychotherapists, nurses, and social workers) in this group document their consultations as usual (typing or conventional dictation), without access to the ambient scribe. Under institutional policy, all clinicians irrespective of study participation may use general-purpose AI tools for administrative and documentation support, provided no patient-identifying data are entered; the control condition is therefore defined as documentation without the ambient scribe, not as documentation without any AI assistance.
Experimental: AI-Group
The mental health care providers in this group use an AI ambient scribe to create their clinical notes from consultations, beginning August 14, 2026.
Device: Artificial Intelligence Ambient Scribe
Listener Tool of the SwissGPT application (AlpineAI AG). After the patient's verbal consent, the provider records the consultation audio via mobile phone or laptop. All audio and text data are processed exclusively on AlpineAI's own GPU infrastructure located in Switzerland and are encrypted with individual keys per customer and per data type. Transcription uses the speech-to-text models Whisper 3 Turbo; from the transcript, a draft clinical note is generated by open-weight large language model Mistral Large 3 based on a standardized prompt developed for the institution. The provider transfers the generated draft note unedited into the electronic health record (ORBIS) and performs all review and editing directly in the EHR, so that the effort of correcting AI-generated drafts is captured by the automated documentation-time measurement. Audio recordings and transcripts are automatically deleted after 30 days.
Other Names:
  • Artificial Intelligence

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Primary Outcome Measures

In a clinical study's protocol, the planned outcome measure that is the most important for evaluating the effect of an intervention/treatment. Most clinical studies have one primary outcome measure, but some have more than one.
Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Time spent on psychiatric documentation
Time Frame: 24 Weeks
Mean minutes spent writing clinical notes (progress notes, initial psychiatric assessment reports, and discharge letters), extracted automatically from EHR (ORBIS) audit logs as form-level editing durations, compared pre-intervention vs. during intervention between groups.
24 Weeks
Documentation quality of initial psychiatric asessment reports
Time Frame: 24 Weeks
Quality of initial psychiatric assessment reports rated with the Physician Documentation Quality Instrument, 9-item version (PDQI-9). Each of the 9 items is scored on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree) and summed to a total score ranging from 9 (minimum) to 45 (maximum); higher scores indicate better documentation quality. Each report is independently rated by 2 of 8 experienced mental health specialists in a balanced rotating-pair design, blinded to provider identity, group, time point, and site.
24 Weeks
Working Alliance
Time Frame: 5 weeks pre intervention and 5 weeks during the intervention.
Patient-rated working alliance measured with the Working Alliance Inventory-Short Revised, German patient version (WAI-SR). The 12 items are each scored on a 5-point scale (1 to 5) and summed to a total score ranging from 12 (minimum) to 60 (maximum); higher scores indicate a stronger (better) working alliance. Reported anonymously by patients after outpatient consultations. In addition to the two-sided superiority test, non-inferiority is prespecified: a lower bound of the two-sided 95% CI of the difference-in-differences estimate above -3.5 WAI-SR sum-scale points will be interpreted as evidence against a clinically relevant deterioration of the alliance.
5 weeks pre intervention and 5 weeks during the intervention.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Secondary Outcome Measures

In a clinical study's protocol, a planned outcome measure that is not as important as the primary outcome measure for evaluating the effect of an intervention but is still of interest. Most clinical studies have more than one secondary outcome measure.
Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Time passed from initial psychiatric assessment note creation to its completion
Time Frame: 24 Weeks
Calendar time from the administrative creation of the initial psychiatric assessment note in the EHR to its completion, capturing documentation backlog. This outcome is separate from total active time spent writing the note.
24 Weeks
Guideline-relevant information coverage and density in initial psychiatric assessment reports
Time Frame: 24 Weeks
Coverage and density of guideline-relevant psychiatric assessment content, scored by a large language model (SwissGPT) against a 71-item checklist derived from the American Psychiatric Association practice guidelines for the psychiatric evaluation of adults. Each item is scored as covered (1), partially covered (0.5), or not covered (0); report length in characters is used to compute information density.
24 Weeks
Patient-perceived empathy of mental health care providers during consultations
Time Frame: 5 weeks pre intervention and 5 weeks during the intervention.
Patient-perceived empathy measured with the Consultation and Relational Empathy (CARE) measure. The 10 items are each scored on a 5-point scale (1 = poor to 5 = excellent) and summed to a total score ranging from 10 (minimum) to 50 (maximum); higher scores indicate greater perceived empathy (better). Completed anonymously by patients alongside the WAI-SR. A study-specific German translation is used; its psychometric properties will be examined and reported.
5 weeks pre intervention and 5 weeks during the intervention.
Documentation quality of ambient scribe-generated initial psychiatric assessment reports (raw AI output)
Time Frame: 15 Weeks
AI-generated initial psychiatric assessment reports, exactly as produced by the ambient scribe and before any human correction, rated by the generating providers (intervention group only) with the Provider Documentation Summarization Quality Instrument (PDSQI-9), an LLM-adapted 9-attribute instrument screening for hallucinations, omissions, redundancy, and biased language. Each attribute is scored on a 5-point scale (1 to 5) and summed to a total score ranging from 9 (minimum) to 45 (maximum); higher scores indicate better quality of the AI-generated summary.
15 Weeks
Clinician Burnout
Time Frame: 5 weeks in the pre-intervention period and the last Week (Week 15) of the post-intervention period.
Work-related burnout of participating providers in both groups, measured with the German version of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT). The 23 core-symptom items (subscales: exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive impairment, emotional impairment) are each scored on a 5-point frequency scale (1 = never to 5 = always) and averaged to a core score ranging from 1.00 (minimum) to 5.00 (maximum); higher scores indicate more burnout symptoms (worse outcome). The 10 secondary-symptom items are scored and averaged on the same 1.00-5.00 metric, with higher scores likewise indicating a worse outcome.
5 weeks in the pre-intervention period and the last Week (Week 15) of the post-intervention period.

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Sponsor

The organization or person who initiates the study and who has authority and control over the study.
Psychiatrie St. Gallen

Collaborators

Collaborators

An organization other than the sponsor that provides support for a clinical study. This support may include activities related to funding, design, implementation, data analysis, or reporting.
University of St.Gallen

Investigators

Investigators

A researcher involved in a clinical study. Related terms include site principal investigator, site sub-investigator, study chair, study director, and study principal investigator.
  • Principal Investigator: Maja Dobelsek, MD, Universität St. Gallen

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

Study Start

The actual date on which the first participant was enrolled in a clinical study. The "anticipated" study start date is the date that the researchers think will be the study start date.
July 13, 2026

Primary Completion (Estimated)

Primary Completion

The date on which the last participant in a clinical study was examined or received an intervention to collect final data for the primary outcome measure. Whether the clinical study ended according to the protocol or was terminated does not affect this date. For clinical studies with more than one primary outcome measure with different completion dates, this term refers to the date on which data collection is completed for all the primary outcome measures. The "anticipated" primary completion date is the date that the researchers think will be the primary completion date for the study.
December 31, 2026

Study Completion (Estimated)

Study Completion

The date on which the last participant in a clinical study was examined or received an intervention/treatment to collect final data for the primary outcome measures, secondary outcome measures, and adverse events (that is, the last participant's last visit). The "anticipated" study completion date is the date that the researchers think will be the study completion date.
December 31, 2026

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

First Submitted

The date on which the study sponsor or investigator first submitted a study record to ClinicalTrials.gov. There is typically a delay of a few days between the first submitted date and the record's availability on ClinicalTrials.gov (the first posted date).
August 6, 2026

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

The date on which the study sponsor or investigator first submits a study record that is consistent with National Library of Medicine (NLM) quality control (QC) review criteria. The sponsor or investigator may need to revise and submit a study record one or more times before NLM's QC review criteria are met. It is the responsibility of the sponsor or investigator to ensure that the study record is consistent with the NLM QC review criteria.
August 18, 2026

First Posted (Actual)

First Posted

The date on which the study record was first available on ClinicalTrials.gov after National Library of Medicine (NLM) quality control (QC) review has concluded. There is typically a delay of a few days between the date the study sponsor or investigator submitted the study record and the first posted date.
August 20, 2026

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

Last Update Posted

The most recent date on which changes to a study record were made available on ClinicalTrials.gov. There may be a delay between when the changes were submitted to ClinicalTrials.gov by the study's sponsor or investigator (the last update submitted date) and the last update posted date.
August 20, 2026

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

The most recent date on which the study sponsor or investigator submitted changes to a study record that are consistent with National Library of Medicine (NLM) quality control (QC) review criteria. It is the responsibility of the sponsor or investigator to ensure that the study record is consistent with the NLM QC review criteria.
August 18, 2026

Last Verified

Last Verified

The most recent date on which the study sponsor or investigator confirmed the information about a clinical study on ClinicalTrials.gov as accurate and current. If a study with a recruitment status of recruiting; not yet recruiting; or active, not recruiting has not been confirmed within the past 2 years, the study's recruitment status is shown as unknown.
August 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

Other Study ID Numbers

Identifiers or ID numbers other than the NCT number that are assigned to a clinical study by the study's sponsor, funders, or others. These numbers may include unique identifiers from other trial registries and National Institutes of Health grant numbers.
  • S012026

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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