Adoption Is a Trust Question as Much as a Workflow One

When clinicians push back on ambient AI, the instinct is often to frame it as a technology problem — the interface, the note quality, the workflow fit. But the Becker’s panel pointed to something more foundational.

Physicians who hold back on ambient adoption are frequently responding to a pattern, not a product. Years of EHR implementations that promised efficiency and delivered more administrative work have created reasonable skepticism. Tools that were positioned as improvements became burdens. Decisions were made for clinicians rather than with them. When the next technology arrives, even a genuinely useful one, it brings that history with it.

Resistance is a trust problem, not a tech problem. The systems winning adoption are the ones that let clinicians see the output, correct it, and watch it get smarter.

— Percy Bhathena, VP of Product & AI, DeliverHealth, Becker’s Panel 2026

What changes the dynamic is transparency — giving clinicians visibility into the documentation output, inviting correction, and letting them observe the platform respond to their input over time. Trust is rebuilt through experience, not assurance. The organizations making progress on adoption understand that the first ask isn’t “use this tool.” It’s “see what it does, and tell us what you think.”

Governance as the First Decision

MultiCare Health System made an intentional choice before rollout: ambient AI would be clinically owned and IT-enabled. The distinction was deliberate. Their leadership recognized that framing the deployment as an IT initiative — even a well-supported one — risked creating the perception that technology was being done to physicians rather than with them.

Positioning ambient documentation as a clinical decision, with IT as the enabling partner, changed the conversation from compliance to ownership. Physicians who participate in decisions about clinical tools engage with them differently from those who receive them.

This governance structure isn’t a communications strategy. It’s an operational one. When clinicians have a meaningful role in how a tool is configured, evaluated, and refined, the feedback loop that improves the platform also builds the adoption that sustains it.

Answering the Question Every Clinician Asks First

Reid Health built its adoption approach around a single question: what’s in it for me? Not as a slogan, but as an operational commitment. Before rollout, every clinician had access to a clear, specific answer about how ambient documentation would change their day — not the organization’s day, theirs.

This is a harder question to answer than it sounds. Rural access pressures at Reid amplified it: physicians managing longer appointment slots, seeing patients who had traveled significant distances, absorbing the administrative weight of an understaffed environment. “Giving time back” was the core value proposition, and it held because it was specific and honest rather than aspirational.

The systems that reached the highest adoption rates shared this pattern: clinical rationale, not just operational rationale, was built into the deployment from the beginning. Physician champions weren’t endorsers — they were colleagues who could answer the specialty-specific version of the question, with credibility, in the room.

When Adoption Stalls — and What Moves It Forward

The Becker’s panel discussed several systems that saw adoption plateau despite open access and available technology. The pattern was consistent: the platform was configured and ready. The human infrastructure around it hadn’t been built yet.

One system reported approximately 40% adoption with open access, then saw significant acceleration after introducing specialty-specific physician champions and personalized setup support. Another moved from several hundred users to over a thousand within three months after shifting to an enterprise license model that removed utilization friction — and by the three-month mark, more than 80% of encounters were being documented with the selected tool.

Specialty adoption proved the steepest challenge, particularly in surgical environments. Shorter note formats, higher workflow sensitivity, and a different relationship between the documentation act and the clinical encounter meant that a single rollout model didn’t transfer. Understanding the clinical “why” for each specialty — and adapting the approach accordingly — was what made the difference. The technology was the same. The deployment was not.

Building the Environment Around the Technology

The through-line across every panelist’s experience was this: ambient AI performs best when the organizational environment around it is ready. That environment includes governance structures that give clinicians ownership, change management processes that build trust incrementally, and specialty-specific support that meets physicians where they are rather than where the rollout plan assumes they are.

At DeliverHealth, this shapes how we approach InstaNote deployments. Platform configuration is the foundation — but sustained adoption depends on what’s built around it. The Becker’s panel confirmed what we see across our own health system partnerships: the organizations that invest in the organizational side of the equation get compounding returns. Adoption grows. Trust grows. And the platform gets better because the feedback loop is working.

Percy put it directly in the panel discussion: looking toward 2028, strong change management — alongside deep integration and enterprise-level governance — is what DeliverHealth sees separating ambient AI programs that compound in value from those that plateau. That framing matters because it positions change management not as a remediation for a struggling rollout, but as a deliberate design choice made at the start. The 20% that is technology matters. But it’s the 80% that determines whether the investment delivers.

At DeliverHealth, our deployment approach to InstaNote extends beyond platform configuration. Sustained adoption depends on the organizational environment around the technology, and supporting that environment is part of what we do.

Interested in deploying ambient AI? Schedule a demo today to see if InstaNote is right for your organization.