AI Ambient Scribe in Psychiatry

Summary

The goal of this clinical trial is to learn if an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that listens to appointments and drafts clinical notes can help clinicians in psychiatric care. Researchers also want to know if the tool changes how patients experience their care. The study includes mental health care providers (physicians, psychologists/psychotherapists, nurses, and social workers) at Psychiatrie St. Gallen and the adult patients they see in their appointments.

The main questions it aims to answer are:

* Does the AI tool lower the time clinicians spend writing notes?
* Are notes written with the AI tool as good as or better than notes written without it?
* Do patients notice a difference in their relationship with their clinician when the tool is used?

Researchers will compare clinicians who use the AI tool to clinicians who keep writing notes their usual way, before and during the intervention period, to see if writing time, note quality, and the patient-rated therapeutic relationship differ between the two groups.

Clinicians will:

Join one of two groups. One group starts using the AI tool on August 14, 2026. The other group keeps writing notes the usual way. Both groups will be observed until the end of November 2026, with note quality evaluation completed in December 2026. Clinicians who cannot contribute to all measurements may, with their consent, remain in the study for automated measurement of documentation time only.

Patients will:

* Be invited to fill out a short, anonymous survey about their experience with their clinician.
* Be asked to agree, in writing, that researchers may review the report from their initial assessment appointment.

Conditions

• Therapeutic Alliance
• Empathy
• Documentation
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Efficiency of Physician Documentation
• Quality Improvement
• Burnout

Interventions

DEVICE

Artificial Intelligence Ambient Scribe

Listener Tool of the SwissGPT application (AlpineAI AG). After the patient's verbal consent, the provider records the consultation audio via mobile phone or laptop. All audio and text data are processed exclusively on AlpineAI's own GPU infrastructure located in Switzerland and are encrypted with individual keys per customer and per data type. Transcription uses the speech-to-text models Whisper 3 Turbo; from the transcript, a draft clinical note is generated by open-weight large language model Mistral Large 3 based on a standardized prompt developed for the institution. The provider transfers the generated draft note unedited into the electronic health record (ORBIS) and performs all review and editing directly in the EHR, so that the effort of correcting AI-generated drafts is captured by the automated documentation-time measurement. Audio recordings and transcripts are automatically deleted after 30 days.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of St.Gallen

  collaborator OTHER

• Psychiatrie St. Gallen

  lead OTHER_GOV

Principal Investigators

• Maja Dobelsek, MD · Universität St. Gallen

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2026-07-13

Primary Completion

2026-12-31

Completion

2026-12-31

Countries

• Switzerland

Study Locations