AI scribe platforms in the specialty trenches: Surgical, behavioral health, and rural care

Note: This is the last in a three-article series from DHI and Heidi Health on the next phase of AI scribe solutions and approaches. The first article explored AI scribes as clinical partners. This second piece looked at AI scribe as a platform instead of a standalone tool. This final installment details at how scribe platform flexibility plays out inside individual specialty healthcare providers. 

Much of the conversation about AI scribe tools tends to focus on the benefits for primary care physicians. There’s good reason for that, as it’s a field where burnout from documentation and other administrative tasks can have significant downstream implications for patient outcomes and high-acuity utilization.

However, there are also clear benefits to deploying AI scribe platforms beyond the PCP office. In specialties as diverse as orthopedic care, behavioral health, and rural health, organizations experience tangible savings of time and resources by applying the same underlying architecture in multiple settings.

Orthopedics: High-volume documentation at scale

Practices such as Minnesota’s St. Cloud Orthopedics commonly cover a range of subspecialties, procedures, and care settings, all supported by staff rotating among rooms in clinical workflows where handoffs are the norm. This contributes to a significant administration burden for orthopedics – one that’s all too often addressed after hours.

Where traditional transcription and dictation services fell short, an AI scribe platform transformed documentation for St. Cloud Orthopedics. Most notes were ready within five hours, compared to several days. This helped the practice speed up prior authorization, referral, and billing workflows, all but eliminating the clinical backlogs that lead to delayed care, poor outcomes, and declining patient satisfaction.

One key to success for St. Cloud Orthopedics was a phased rollout. The practice started with self-serve trials, followed by three weeks of vendor-supported trials. This let clinical champions address challenges and fit the tool into multiple workflows and roles. For example, the organization created versatile templates as well as targeted snippets for procedures, doses, consent statements, and therapy goals that require exact wording for clinical and compliance purposes.

Phased, clinician-driven implementation led to near-universal adoption. Up to 95% of clinical encounters now use the AI scribe platform, and practice leaders are exploring additional use cases ranging from surgical letters to therapy workflows.

Behavioral health: Retain critical clinical nuance

Behavioral health presents unique documentation demands. How patients say something — their tone or expression, for example — often matters more than what they say. Capturing such emotional nuance with the written word takes time, which is a precious commodity for practices that depend on volume and productivity to boost revenue. After-hours documentation takes an additional toll on therapists when they must relive patients’ traumatic experiences.

Adopting an AI scribe platform helped High Country Behavioral Health overcome these challenges. Therapists in the practice, which serves Idaho and Wyoming, saved an average of four minutes per session and 30 minutes per day. Since the tool runs in the background during virtual and in-person appointments, there’s also no more emotional fatigue from typing notes.

Much like St. Cloud Orthopedics, High Country Behavioral Health started with a handful of users and a set of core templates designed to match their electronic health record (EHR) structure. The organization collaborated with its vendor partner to create advanced templates, focusing on use cases such as clinical diagnostic assessment and enhanced supervision, and using weekly staff meetings to introduce the tool to additional users.

Rural health: Increase access in underserved areas

Like many organizations in rural communities, southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley Health Medical Center provides a mix of family medicine, specialty care, and hospital-based services. Such complex caseloads force clinicians to carry a heavy cognitive burden when they must document encounters after hours. It also means general-purpose dictation and scribing tools typically miss the mark.

Turning to an AI scribe platform helped San Luis Valley Health cut documentation time by 50%, which eliminated evening backlogs. An important feature of the platform was support for integrated wearables that can capture notes while offline, which helped clinicians caring for patients in areas with limited bandwidth or cellular connectivity.

Once clinicians review and add to notes (e.g. exam details, diagnostic notes, etc.), they’re pasted directly into the EHR. Clinicians within the organization used the time savings to shift from 30-minute to 20-minute appointments, increasing access to care without adding staff.

The future of scribe platforms is specialty shaped

These case studies for specialty care demonstrate that AI scribes only work when they’re customizable. General-purpose dictation tools cannot capture the nuance that separates behavioral health, rural health, or orthopedics. What’s more, customization only works at scale with platform architecture flexible enough to support dozens of specialties without expanding complexity and cost.

That’s why the future of the AI scribe won’t be defined by a static tool. Instead, the future will see a progression of value propositions. The standalone scribe will become an extensible platform. The platform will be applied to a multidisciplinary care setting. Multidisciplinary will evolve for specific specialties. Each stage will be built on the one before it.

The organizations staying ahead of this curve leverage AI scribe platforms capable of specializing without the need for additional vendors and disparate AI scribe tools. For leaders evaluating these tools, the questions have shifted from EHR integrations and feature sets. Now, organizations need to consider whether an AI scribe aligns with their vison for the future of care delivery while supporting workflows that give clinicians back their time.

About the Author

Nancy, Cibotti, MD, CMIO, Heidi

Dr. Cibotti is a primary care physician with extensive experience in healthcare leadership and innovation. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and medical degree at Brown University. After her primary care residency at New York Hospital she returned to Boston and spent 20 years at Massachusetts General Hospital and on the teaching faculty at Harvard Medical School. Subsequently, Dr Cibotti joined Iora Health where she served as the Market Medical Director and opened 2 new primary care practices serving the needs of frail elders. In the past 8 years, she has held multiple roles at Beth Israel Lahey Health including Chief Innovation Officer of Primary Care and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer. Her accomplishments include launching BILH’s virtual primary care program, implementing ambient AI scribes and helping to lead a system wide Epic implementation. In January 2026, Dr. Cibotti joined Heidi Health as the US based Chief Medical Information Officer.

About Heidi

Heidi is building an AI Care Partner to expand clinical capacity by supporting every stage of care delivery. In addition to its AI scribe, Heidi has also introduced Evidence, giving clinicians access to trusted medical research at the point of care. Heidi supports more than 2.7 million patient interactions each week in 110 languages from 190 countries. Learn more at heidihealth.com.