Lessons from the largest rollout of ambient AI in healthcare to date

Where could ambient AI technology, already one of the most talked about new tools for medical practices today, have the biggest impact? Try the massive Permanente Medical Group serving Northern California along with its associated Permanente groups along the Pacific Northwest, Intermountain West, and Atlantic Coast.

At the 2025 HIMSS Global Conference, Brian Hoberman, executive vice president of information technology and chief information officer of The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG), joined his colleague Dr. Vincent Liu, chief data officer at TPMG, to showcase their organization’s large-scale deployment of ambient AI scribes, viewed today as the largest known rollout of this type of technology.

A response to a critical crisis

The impetus for TPMG’s ambient AI scribe initiative emerged directly from an intensifying physician burnout crisis. This burnout, driven largely by overwhelming documentation demands in EHRs, became starkly pronounced in the post-pandemic healthcare landscape. Physicians in TPMG’s Northern California region alone were managing roughly 80 million quarterly messages, leading to an unsustainable increase in the after-hours documentation known as “pajama time.”