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Ambient Clinical Documentation & Conversational AI for Safer Care

A University of Bern network project integrating medicine, linguistics, law, patient safety, and data science to evaluate and build responsible AI documentation for real-world clinical practice.

Explore the Project Media
Milestones & Status
Ethics & governance framework Completed
Protocol approved, patient recruitment established.
Audio → ASR → LLM pipeline (v0) Completed
Dialect-aware post-processing & term correction working.
Pilot projects conducted Completed
Triage setting & patient encounters (ACD).
Follow-up project (≈5,000 patients) Submitted
Proposal currently under review.

About the Project

Clinical documentation is essential for patient safety but increasingly burdens clinicians. This project evaluates AI-based documentation under real conditions such as dialectal variability, environmental noise and fragmented encounters involving multiple providers. Authentic Swiss data serve as a stress test for medicine at large. We combine legal, linguistic, clinical, and computational perspectives to study accuracy, safety, and compliance, and to deliver practical tools for deployment.

Why now?

Healthcare is adopting AI rapidly, yet real-world evaluation in multilingual, high-pressure settings is scarce. We bridge that gap.

What’s unique?

A truly interdisciplinary approach and open, reusable outputs designed for Swiss realities and transferrable beyond.

Digital Dialogues Triage

Deliverables

Open-source Pipeline

Modular tools for audio normalization, dialect-aware ASR post-processing, terminology correction, and LLM summarization.

Benchmarks & Lexicons

De-identified evaluation sets and a Swiss-German medical term lexicon with common ASR misrecognitions.

Risk & Oversight Toolkit

Error-risk mapping, uncertainty visualizations, and checklists supporting safe human-in-the-loop use.

Policy & Consent

Consent templates and policy briefs on documentation, evidence, and accountability for AI-generated records.

Team

Adrian Leemann
Adrian Leemann

Sociolinguistics & Dialects

Leads linguistic analysis and develops Swiss German medical lexicons and benchmarks across dialects.

Thomas Sauter
Thomas Sauter

Emergency Medicine & Digital Medicine

Leads clinical evaluation and safety benchmarking. Endowed professor of emergency telemedicine and digital triage.

Franziska Sprecher
Franziska Sprecher

Health Law & Data Protection

Leads legal analysis on consent, evidence and accountability and develops consent templates and policy briefs.

David Schwappach
David Schwappach

Patient Safety & Quality

Leads the safety framework, risk mapping and oversight toolkits for safe human-in-the-loop adoption.

Sukanya Nath
Sukanya Nath

Natural Language Processing, Data Science Lab

Leads the development, evaluation and adaptation of research-oriented AI and NLP pipelines for clinical speech data.

Wolf Hautz
Wolf Hautz

Emergency Medicine & Diagnostic Quality

Brings experience in interventional trials, diagnostic quality research and digital decision support.

University Hospital Basel

Publications

Elhilali et al. (2025)

Ambient documentation in multilingual clinical settings: early findings and challenges.

Publication PDF

Media

SRF Einstein: “Echt oder KI?”

Our project was featured on SRF’s Einstein. Start watching at minute 29:24.

SRF Einstein episode “Echt oder KI?”

Contact

For inquiries about collaboration, data access, or media, please reach out:

Institution: Emergency Department, Inselspital, University of Bern
Location: Bern, Switzerland
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