AI Scribe Assessment & Solution Selection
A successful implementation starts well before “implementation,” in fact, successful implementations always start with an assessment, which guides planning.
I covered the importance of assessment in this article. It’s a step that most organizations prefer to skip, but it’s often a fatal mistake.
A successful assessment is more than checking off boxes on a checklist. It is first and foremost, a form of qualitative and quantitative research of the current state.
Assemble Your Frontline Stakeholders
It starts with identifying ALL key stakeholders who need a seat at the table. For an AI scribe solution, your stakeholder group should include:
Clinicians: Primary users who need involvement from day one. I get you can’t pull all of your clinicians out of clinic, but you can appoint 1-2 representatives who will represent the clinician perspective throughout the project.
Clinical Informatics/EHR Team: Key for seamless EHR integration
IT Department: Who are critical for technical assessment and integration complexities.
Compliance & Legal: Essential for ensuring HIPAA compliance and risk mitigation
C-Suite / Senior Leadership: Necessary for resource allocation and adoption support
Billing/Coding: Important for understanding how notes and coding flow through to patient accounts and the impact of the proposed solution.
Quality Improvement: The clinical note is the source of truth for quality improvement, so it’s important they are at the table to ensure that the proposed solution addresses their requirements also.
Medical Assistants and/or Nursing: Often an overlooked user stakeholder group, but if they are using the solution as part of the rooming process or order completion, they need to be at the table.
Referrals: If the solution tees up referrals, it is helpful to have a representative from this department.
In the trenches: Do not fall prey to the convenience of relying on the managers or directors of these departments as being representative of their stakeholder group. You absolutely need the people doing the work on the daily!
Validate Your Understanding of the Problem
Validate your understanding of the problem you are trying to solve in collaboration with your stakeholders. Often, organizations lack nuanced understanding of the problem, which becomes detrimental to the implementation process.
Nuanced understanding arises from gathering both qualitative and quantitative data: This should involve key stakeholders in the collection, data analysis, and reporting.
Map current workflows: Understand existing documentation methods (typing, dictation, human scribes). Know that it is highly likely that these workflows vary across different providers. It’s important you take a full inventory of the different permutations to inform procedure development, change management, and training.
Get clear on the data: What data do you reference to understand the scope of your problem? What key performance indicators depict different aspects of the problem (ex: cycle time for patient visits, time to note completion/closure, MA rooming time, etc.)
Establish benchmark data: Identify the data measures you will measure and track throughout and after implementation
Develop Your Problem Statement
Establish your problem statement: This is your single source of truth across stakeholder groups. It is your universal why, or your true north. It is the problem you are solving, which may be clinician burnout, decreasing documentation time, enhancing patient satisfaction, or increasing productivity.
In the trenches: It is incredibly important that your stakeholder group agree on the problem statement and the data benchmarks. If this step is done well, your stakeholders should have a nuanced understanding of the problem and understand their ownership and role around solving the problem.
Develop Your AIM Statement
Once you can quantify the problem and have appropriate benchmarks, you can then craft your AIM statement. Your AIM statement is a concise, written description of what the project seeks to accomplish. It clearly outlines the purpose and desired outcome in a S.M.A.R.T. format.
Vendor and Solution Evaluation
Only after you have a validated understanding of the problem and all of its nuances, developed a clear problem statement, and an AIM statement are you ready to start evaluating solutions and solution providers.
In the trenches: Know that most organizations want to jump to the solution selection, taking for granted that they fully understand the scope of the problem and all of its nuances. Nine times out of ten, they don’t.
Core Solution Features
The core solution features that should inform solution selection can be found here:
Technical Considerations
Technical considerations that should inform solution and vendor selection can be found here:
Vendor Management Considerations
Service Level Agreements: Learn what commitments the vendor makes in terms of service levels, response time, and support mechanisms
Business Associate Agreement: Ensure comprehensive BAA addressing all relevant HIPAA requirements
Contract Management: Understand the processes for contract renewal, modification, or termination
Short-List Top Solutions & Vendors
This process works differently across organizations. It’s important for organizational compliance to understand your organization’s requirements. You don't want to get to contract finalization and review only to find that you didn't follow the designated process and the deal is toast.
Large to Mid-Sized Organizations
Organization size and maturity normally drives procurement requirements.
You can expect:
A formal RFP process
A policy and procedure that guides criteria for evaluation, ranking (and weighting of criteria), and who needs to be involved.
Small to Mid-Sized Organizations
May have a formal process similar to large organizations if they have strong organizational maturity.
In the absence of a formal process, most organizations require executive approval and sponsorship with varying levels of supportive documentation.
If you are the project champion, it’s your job to know, up-front, the designated process for selection and approval.
In the trenches: If your organization does not have a clear framework for solution selection and approval, make sure you clearly document how the decision is made and what objective criteria were used. This should be stakeholder driven. You want broad consensus, or you will be holding the bag alone if the solution doesn’t perform or the project goes sideways.
How Mentero.AI Helps
Depending on client preferences, we support clients at any to every stage of AI adoption. Some clients only need help with a thorough assessment, whereas others have Mentero.AI manage the entire process. Having a strategic partner at-elbow helps to ensure adoption success.
