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Ambient Only vs. Longitudinal Data-Enhanced AI Documentation: A Pilot Study Quantifying the Value of Historical Clinical Context in Primary Care

Abstract Background: Ambient artificial intelligence (AI) clinical documentation tools have gained rapid adoption in healthcare to address physician burnout from documentation burden. However, current implementations primarily rely on real-time audio capture without systematically incorporating longitudinal patient data, potentially limiting documentation completeness for chronic disease management. Objective: To compare documentation completeness between ambient audio-only workflows and those augmented with historical clinical data from electronic health records (EHRs) for type 2 diabetes and hypertension encounters in primary care. Methods: We conducted a retrospective, paired, cross-sectional study of 354 primary care encounters in which diabetes mellitus (DM, n=119) and/or hypertension (HTN, n=281) were treated. Each condition instance was analysed twice to compare two methods of automated documentation: using only physician-patient conversation transcripts (termed "ambient only") compared with consolidated automated documentation that includes historical clinical data in addition to the ambient conversation (ambient + history; termed "consolidated"). Documentation completeness was assessed using the "assessment" subset of the QNOTE clinical documentation quality measurement instrument, evaluating four domains: completeness, clinical coherence, clarity, conciseness. Scoring was automated using an LLM pipeline with physician validation on a 20% sample. Results: Consolidated documentation achieved significantly higher mean total assessment composite score compared to ambient-only (94.8 vs. 80.1 on a scale of 0-100; difference 14.6 points; 95% CI 13.4-15.8; P<0.001). The largest improvements was observed in the completeness domain (difference 42.5 points; P<0.001). DM and HTN both showed similar performance of consolidated documentation vs. ambient only. Conclusions: Augmenting ambient AI documentation with historical EHR data significantly improves documentation completeness for chronic disease management in primary care. These preliminary findings challenge the prevailing audio-first implementation paradigm and suggest that bidirectional EHR integration may be essential for comprehensive AI-assisted documentation, particularly for conditions requiring synthesis of longitudinal clinical data.

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