NEJM AI Trial Reports Efficiency Gains for Physicians Using Nabla’s Ambient AI Assistant
NEW YORK, December 4, 2025 - A peer-reviewed, randomized clinical trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine AI (NEJM AI), Ambient AI Scribes in Clinical Practice: A Randomized Trial, has evaluated two leading ambient AI scribe technologies, Nabla and Microsoft DAX, in routine outpatient clinical practice, offering one of the most comprehensive real-world assessments to date of generative AI enabled documentation.
The three-arm randomized trial included 238 physicians across 14 specialties, assigned to either Nabla, DAX, or a usual-care control group. Conducted between November 2024 and January 2025, the study examined documentation efficiency as its primary endpoint and assessed multiple validated measures of burnout, task load, and work exhaustion. More than 48,000 total outpatient visits across intervention and control arms were analyzed.
According to the published findings, physicians using Nabla experienced a 9.5 percent decrease in time-in-note compared with the control group. Nabla was the only intervention group to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement on the study’s primary efficiency outcome, representing a meaningful reduction in the time clinicians spend writing notes during routine practice. By contrast, physicians using DAX demonstrated a t 1.7 percent decrease in time-in-note versus the control group, which indicates no statistically significant difference for that arm of the trial.
In addition to documentation time, the study reported potential improvements in several clinician experience measures for physicians using either AI scribe. Physicians also noted that the tools were easy to learn and use, and that ambient AI helped support more direct engagement with patients during visits. These findings offer insight into how ambient AI tools may influence the day-to-day clinical environment and overall experience. They also provide useful context for health systems evaluating how ambient AI documentation tools can support clinicians and enhance workflow efficiency.
“Our focus has always been on building an ambient AI assistant that meets clinicians directly at the point of care,” said Alex LeBrun, co-founder and CEO of Nabla. “Seeing those efforts reflected in a randomized clinical trial is an encouraging milestone. We are committed to delivering technology that reduces administrative friction and meaningfully improves the clinician experience.”