Riverside Clinic flipped on an AI scribe pilot this morning and my first 12 files sounded like speakerphone in a hallway — overhead pages, carts clattering, and providers reading the canned summary instead of dictating specifics like exact med doses or device settings. Is anyone else seeing these rollouts tank clarity and completeness, or did I just get the unlucky batch today?
We hit that in our pilot too — like transcribing from inside a rolling cart. The quick fix was a canned feedback line on every file: please state exact doses, units, and device settings even if the scribe pre-fills, and I CC’d the pilot lead; within a week most providers ditched speakerphone or spoke closer and the meds/device details came back.
Had this during a 7 a.m. scribe pilot — carts clattering and providers reading the canned summary. I asked them to cue the numbers by saying “doses and settings next” before dictating specifics, and the ASR stopped swallowing values; if that’s a hard sell, @iscr482’s handset move is a decent stopgap.
Quick fix for our pilot was a $12 clip-on lav plugged into the dictation phone — clipped to the badge it killed the hallway clatter and we started getting clean med/device numbers, @iscr482; if procurement’s slow, ask them to say numbers twice with a beat between — has that helped at Riverside?
Not just you — my first 12 after our pilot had ‘overhead pages’ stomping the details and providers parroting the AI summary. What helped was getting IT to enable noise suppression on the dictation bridge and bump the VAD threshold; the next batch had clear med/device numbers even in the hallway. If that’s not an option, have them give a 2‑second pre-roll of silence before speaking so the recorder locks onto their voice.
I’ve had luck asking clinicians to end with a quick ‘numbers recap’ before they stop — something like ‘dose plus units, rate, and setting values’ — so even if they read the AI’s canned summary first, the tail of the audio still captures the specifics. It’s not perfect in a noisy unit, but it cut my follow-ups a lot.