How healthcare AI transformed clinician efficiency at Pella Regional Health Center
Located southeast of Des Moines, Iowa, Pella Regional Health Center is a large critical access hospital on MEDITECH whose clinicians face a common challenge across rural healthcare: more patients, more documentation, and more after-hours work. To address these mounting challenges, Pella, like many other hospitals in the last 5 years, began to explore clinical AI as a possible solution to both clinician burden and revenue capture.
But getting clinicians to trust and use clinical AI was a different task altogether. During a MUSE webinar on August 17, 2026, we asked Rebecca Duffy, MSN, RN, Pella's IT Training and Program Manager, to walk through what happened when the hospital rolled out Avo's AI Scribe and Ask Avo, how clinicians felt about using AI tools, and what ultimately won them over.
From scribe to consult: AI at the bedside
Pella's clinicians were looking for help with an age-old problem: documentation. As a critical access hospital with limited budget and constrained billing teams, Pella needed a way to improve documentation across clinician types and specialties without hiring expensive CDI teams or increasing clinician burdens.
Many clinicians were asking for a scribe, and Duffy identified that AI tools like Avo’s AI Scribe could accomplish this. After adopting Avo a few years ago, she says, “it really has just kind of been a game changer for us."
"One particular provider, who sees anywhere from 50 to 60 patients a day, was actually pretty resistant at first to adopting this," Duffy said. At some point, “he was kind of forced into using it out of necessity, and actually figured out, wow, this really is super helpful. His notes are so much more complete."
And it changed the exam room itself. Pella’s patients noticed the increased eye contact and the patient interaction with their provider seemed much more personal, all because the provider wasn't having to look down and take notes and be on their computer. “They were just letting Avo listen and do the [transcribing], and they were able to be more present," Duffy added.
Using AI to build a transcript of an encounter isn’t the whole picture of a clinician’s day, however. From managing treatment to responding to denial letters and CDI queries, there’s a sizable workload that every clinician manages every week.
That’s where Ask Avo, the first context-aware clinical AI tool embedded directly in the EHR, comes in. Ask Avo pulls live patient context and references leading medical knowledge bases, like DynaMed, and can be used to complete a host of tasks at the point of care: answering clinical questions, drafting documentation, and performing clinical tasks like a differential diagnosis.
"For one of our ortho mid-level providers, [Avo] was a huge time saver,” Duffy said. "She was getting a lot of the denial letters. Previously, it would take her probably over an hour to draft these appeal letters, and using Ask Avo, she's been able to do those now in less than five minutes in most instances. The letters are much more thorough, and so the reversals are coming through even faster than they used to."
It’s a huge win for Pella’s clinicians: moving from an hour of drafting letters to building one in five minutes, with better appeal win rates.
AI adoption by providers
Pella never required clinicians to use AI. Instead, they provided the tools and encouraged clinicians to try it out.
The rollout started small, with a pilot group gathering feedback before anything went wider, and the results were persuasive. "It was quickly identified that it was helpful. Some providers were anxiously awaiting to get out of that pilot period and to start using it," Duffy remembered.
In just 10 weeks, Pella went from 4 to 40 users.
Some clinics, especially OB and well-child visits already leaning hard on MEDITECH templates, took longer to see the fit. But what ultimately brought them to using Avo was watching colleagues get their evenings back.
"Providers were finding themselves staying late after a full day of clinic just to get caught up on documentation and stuff, and so that's affecting their home life as well," Duffy said. "We had one provider in particular who used the term life-changing, as far as just being able to get some of that personal time back. She's able to leave at the end of her workday and not have to worry about doing more work when she gets home."
One nurse practitioner came back from vacation to a backlog of queued notes from a high-volume clinic. With Avo, she went through 180 charts in a matter of a few hours. "She was really drowning prior to adopting these tools, and she now feels like she's able to more efficiently get through the stuff that she needs to do and still call it a day when it's time,” Duffy noted.
Adoption also showed up in a use case nobody planned for: onboarding to new patient panels. Pella’s providers used Avo effectively to get a quick overview of a new patient before walking into the room, without having to dig in and spend hours reviewing the patient's chart.
Built for scrutiny, not just speed
None of this works without trust, and Duffy was clear-eyed about what that requires. "We review and make sure that [what Avo generates] is correct before we just pull it in," she said. While Pella hasn't seen AI hallucination issues with Avo, if and when anything looks “off,” her team always engages the Avo team immediately, who have been “super responsive” to help them figure it out.
Pella had already run this playbook once, with a major tech company’s dictation and ambient scribe solution. The difference stuck with Duffy. With their previous scribe company, it was “a cumbersome onboarding process” even as they were training clinicians. In comparison, she noted, onboarding with Avo was significantly easier: just 10 to 15 minutes with the Avo team to run through the tools, after which the clinicians are “off and going with it.”
Her advice to physicians and nurses who are just getting started with AI is similar to how Pella approached the rollout of Avo: don’t set a mandate or rigid expectations. "Just turn it on, take it into the patient's room and see what it gives you and how it works,” she said.
Watch the full recording of the MUSE webinar featuring Dr. Mordechai Raskas (CMIO, Avo) and Rebecca Duffy (Manager, IT Training, Pella Regional Health Center).