Emergency Medicine Practitioners Overall Well-being Enhancement With Ambient AI Scribes (EMPOWER)

August 3, 2026 updated by: Philip R.O. Payne, Washington University School of Medicine
The primary objective of the study is to investigate the impact of an ambient AI scribe on clinicians' wellness and well-being outcomes; additionally, the investigators will also explore how the use of the ambient AI scribe will lead to changes in documentation burden, clinical note characteristics and financial productivity.

Study Overview

Status

Active, not recruiting

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

55

Phase

  • 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

  • United States
    • Missouri
      • St Louis, Missouri, United States, 63110
        • Washington University School of Medicine

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

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Child
  • Adult
  • Older Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Must be a Clinician (attendings and advanced practice practitioners) who is part of the Emergency Medicine Department
  • Must be willing to use Ambient AI as apart of their clinical practice work

Exclusion Criteria:

-Residents who are apart of the Emergency Medicine Department

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: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: Single

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Ambient AI Scribe Intervention, Wave 1 (Step-wedge design)
Clinicians use an ambient AI scribe during patient encounters to assist with clinical documentation. Wave 1 participants receive the intervention for 18 weeks. Outcomes are compared before and after implementation.
Other: Ambient AI Scribe
Clinicians will use an ambient AI scribe as part of routine clinical care. The AI scribe captures the patient-clinician conversation, generates a draft clinical note, and supports documentation in the electronic health record. Clinicians receive training before beginning use of the AI scribe. The intervention is introduced in three sequential waves using a stepped-wedge design, with all participants eventually receiving the intervention.
Experimental: Ambient AI Scribe Intervention, Wave 2 (Step-wedge design)
Clinicians use an ambient AI scribe during patient encounters to assist with clinical documentation. Wave 2 participants receive the intervention for 12 weeks. Outcomes are compared before and after implementation.
Other: Ambient AI Scribe
Clinicians will use an ambient AI scribe as part of routine clinical care. The AI scribe captures the patient-clinician conversation, generates a draft clinical note, and supports documentation in the electronic health record. Clinicians receive training before beginning use of the AI scribe. The intervention is introduced in three sequential waves using a stepped-wedge design, with all participants eventually receiving the intervention.
Experimental: Ambient AI Scribe Intervention Wave 3 (Step-wedge design)
Clinicians use an ambient AI scribe during patient encounters to assist with clinical documentation. Wave 1 participants receive the intervention for 6 weeks. Outcomes are compared before and after implementation.
Other: Ambient AI Scribe
Clinicians will use an ambient AI scribe as part of routine clinical care. The AI scribe captures the patient-clinician conversation, generates a draft clinical note, and supports documentation in the electronic health record. Clinicians receive training before beginning use of the AI scribe. The intervention is introduced in three sequential waves using a stepped-wedge design, with all participants eventually receiving the intervention.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Impact of an ambient AI scribe on clinician well-being and professional fulfillment
Time Frame: From enrollment to the end of maintenance phase at 24 weeks
A linear model will be used to describe the effect of Ambient tool introduction on our co-primary outcomes under the intention-to-treat framework with a random effects structure to describe within provider variability. While high or complete survey completion rates is expected, in the event that not all surveys are completed and returned, a primary analysis on completed surveys only will be performed, and perform sensitivity analyses accounting for potentially systematic survey non-response bias using a response weighting strategy, using provider, scheduling, and patient encounter characteristics to create survey response weights (within each survey time period), then reweighting observations to account for non-response patterns. In analyses for both co-primary outcomes, Wald type hypothesis tests for inferences on the overall Ambient treatment effect and compare p-values to 0.05 / 2 to conservatively account for multiple comparisons using Bonferroni's method will be performed.
From enrollment to the end of maintenance phase at 24 weeks

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Assessment of the longitudinal changes in documentation burden
Time Frame: From enrollment to the end of maintenance phase at 42 weeks
The investigators will fit Bayesian generalized linear models with appropriate link functions and likelihood choices (ie, log and Poisson for count data, logit and Bernoulli for binary responses) to for each encounter, while accounting for serial correlation overall through time (indexed to the day) using an autoregressive modeling structure, within provider patterns using a provider level random intercept, weekday, weekend, and holiday effects using fixed effects terms, and specify a flexible interrupted time series treatment effect using a semi-parametric, thin plate spline to describe how the introduction of Ambient AI affects the relationship between providers and notes, and how that relationship evolves over time. In sensitivity analyses, evaluation of how these effects and their evolution may differ by treatment wave will be assessed. All inferences will be based on describing the mean and 95% credible intervals for the treatment effect daily.
From enrollment to the end of maintenance phase at 42 weeks

Collaborators and Investigators

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

Sponsor

Washington University School of Medicine

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Thomas Kannampallil, PhD, Washington University in Saint Louis

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

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)

April 29, 2026

Primary Completion (Estimated)

December 1, 2026

Study Completion (Estimated)

July 1, 2027

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

July 21, 2026

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

July 28, 2026

First Posted (Actual)

August 3, 2026

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

August 6, 2026

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

August 3, 2026

Last Verified

August 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 202602161

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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