Ambient AI ROI calculator

How each figure is built

Annual hours returned is clinicians multiplied by minutes saved per day, multiplied by working days, divided by sixty. Annual value applies your fully loaded hourly cost to those hours. Net annual position is that value less the annual licence cost, with implementation treated as a one-off rather than smeared across the year. Payback divides the one-off cost by the monthly net. Break-even minutes is the daily saving per clinician at which the returned time is worth exactly the annual licence cost, which is the number to compare the vendor's claim against.

Assumptions and limits

Time returned is not the same as cost removed. An hour given back to a clinician only becomes money if it is reallocated to billable or backlog-clearing work, or if headcount, agency spend or overtime actually falls. If the hour goes home with the clinician, the benefit is real and it is worth having, but it is a retention and burnout benefit and it does not appear in a budget line. Say which one you are claiming before the number reaches a finance committee.

A minutes-saved figure taken from a vendor is a claim rather than a measurement. Until you have measured your own clinicians, on your own note types, in your own build, the input at the top of this page is marketing arithmetic wearing a decimal point. Measured savings are usually smaller than piloted savings, and piloted savings are usually smaller than demonstrated savings.

The model also ignores the ramp, and the ramp is rarely short. Savings in the first weeks are typically negative while clinicians learn to edit rather than dictate. It assumes every clinician uses the tool on every note, which no deployment achieves; if your expected adoption is seventy percent, put seventy percent of the minutes in. It excludes the internal labour of running the thing, the informatics time, the template work, the escalation path when a note is wrong. It excludes any quality effect in either direction. It excludes contract escalators, and it uses a single blended hourly cost where a real medical group has a range wide enough to change the answer.

Nothing here is a clinical, safety or regulatory claim, and nothing here is a statement about any particular product.

What this does not tell you

It cannot tell you whether the vendor's numbers are evidenced. That is a separate question with a separate method, and the scoring we use for it is published at how we score vendors, including what separates an asserted figure from a verified one.

If you need the full instrument, with sensitivity ranges, a per-cohort adoption curve and the vendor scorecard that sits beside it, that lives in the Clinical Documentation and Ambient AI Toolkit.