Beyond Documentation: Sunoh.ai Improving Healthcare Efficiency and Reducing Provider Burnout

October 10, 2024

Cartoon female doctor looking downwards with a depressed face

The issue of provider burnout and the stress of documentation

Burnout among healthcare providers is a phenomenon for which it can be difficult to offer a precise definition. Being tired after a particularly busy but satisfying day, for example, doesn’t mean a doctor or nurse is burned out. They simply need a break.

But a long series of busy and difficult days, leading to frustration and fatigue? Nearly everyone would agree that’s at least putting a provider at risk for burnout.

Each year brings new studies of the number of providers reporting symptoms of burnout and the severity of those symptoms. But even in the absence of a universally recognized definition for burnout, there is general agreement across those studies that somewhere around half of all physicians surveyed consider themselves to be exhibiting symptoms of burnout.

The American Medical Association reports that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the nation’s medical burnout crisis, noting that the end of 2021, 63% of physicians reported symptoms of burnout.

But there appears to be some hope on this issue. A July post by the AMA noted that for the first time since 2020, the percentage of physicians reporting symptoms of burnout has fallen below 50%.

And a May 2024 eClinicalWorks survey of more than 120 healthcare professionals found that 41% were spending four or more hours daily on documentation, 65% believed AI’s best application would be in reducing time spent on such documentation, and just over half estimated they could save at least two hours a day through the use of an efficient AI scribe.

What is AI medical scribe and how it helps alleviate documentation stress

A 2023 report in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health noted that providers who struggle with documentation are 2.8 times more likely to suffer from burnout than those who have those core administrative tasks under control.

Given the central role documentation plays for any physician, AI-powered medical scribes hold tremendous potential to help ease providers’ clinical documentation burdens, lower stress, and reduce burnout.

An AI medical scribe, such as Sunoh.ai, uses AI algorithms to listen to patient/provider conversations, capturing clinical details and creating draft Progress Notes. That means less work for the provider at the end of each day and correspondingly greater opportunities to address burnout by restoring a measure of work/life balance.

How Dr. Rajiv Aggarwal reclaimed his quality of life

Dr. Rajiv Aggarwal of Lansdowne Travel Family Medicine LLC is a sole provider with a very busy practice. As much as he loves his work, the workload was getting to a point where he was thinking of retiring. Then he found Sunoh.ai.

Since implementing Sunoh, Dr. Aggarwal is saving three to four hours of documentation time daily. The integration of Sunoh into eClinicalWorks has transformed his patient interactions and documentation processes, resulting in more precise patient records, and reduced administrative tasks.

On a busy day, Dr. Aggarwal might see between 60 and 70 patients. But he has been able to achieve greater efficiency without compromising on the quality of patient care.

And Dr. Aggarwal is proof that Sunoh.ai can improve work/life balance. Before, he noted, his quality of life was “zero.” But now, he is spending time in the evenings playing racquetball, something that he never thought would have been possible before deploying Sunoh.

And he has no intention of retiring soon!

How AI scribes go beyond just automating documentation

While the primary impact of an AI medical scribe is to reduce documentation time, the importance of documentation means there can be positive impacts throughout the rest of a practice. As Dr. Aggarwal’s case shows, providers who get to go home on time are probably not bringing much or any work home with them. Staff are probably leaving on time as well. And practices may find that some of the time-savings attributable to AI can be spent on other tasks, catching up to long-postponed projects, improving training, seeing a few more patients each day, or even expanding the range of services the practice offers.

That said, the four main areas of improvement that a practice can expect to see following implementation of an AI medical scribe are:

Improved Patient Engagement: AI medical scribes allow providers to focus on the patient during visits; afterward, the provider works from the draft Progress Note created by Sunoh and can add nuances and check accuracy — confident Sunoh has captured the clinical details.
Reduced administrative burden: Because physicians can complete Progress Notes and administrative work in less time, they can use their time more efficiently and effectively; sometimes spending more time with a given patient and perhaps seeing additional patients.
Provider satisfaction: While patients appreciate having their healthcare provider’s full attention during the visit, doctors also benefit from a feeling of getting back to the art of medicine. Renewing that sense of doing what they love can mean more energy and renewed enthusiasm.
Improved work/life balance: Completing documentation on time allows providers to get home early and have some personal time and pursue hobbies. It improves their work-life balance which positively impacts their overall wellbeing.

Why is Sunoh.ai the go-to AI medical scribe?

Illustration of therapist and patient talking while Sunoh.ai uses AI-powered ambient listening technology In a market that offers several AI medical scribes, several factors make Sunoh.ai an outstanding choice.

Sunoh’s ambient listening technology means providers and patients can hold natural language conversations, with no need to worry about intonation, accents, or medical jargon. Sunoh is highly trained, flexible, and produces highly accurate draft Progress Notes and summaries.

Sunoh is EHR-agnostic, available as a stand-alone solution for use with other leading EHRs, is tightly integrated with eClinicalWorks, and is great for all kinds of medical providers, from primary care, family medicine, and pediatrics to specialties such as Behavioral Health, cardiology, rheumatology, and many more.

Sunoh is multimodal and multilingual, allowing providers to use the device of their choice to record patient encounters and giving them the options of doing so in English, Portuguese, and some 20 dialects of Spanish.

And Sunoh is backed by an innovative team that offers strong customer support for users and is constantly working to develop new features and capabilities to improve the product.

Clinical documentation remains the single most burdensome part of most medical practices. To be sure, Sunoh.ai won’t fix everything that needs attention at any given practice. But what it can and will do is what it is already doing for the 50,000+ physicians coast to coast who trust Sunoh for documentation — helping them reclaim valuable hours each day so that they can solve all those other challenges they face.

Click here to visit the Sunoh demo page or, if you want to get started right away, click the “Sign Up” button on that page.