Faster Documentation Enhances Access to Quality Care

February 27, 2025

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When used properly, ambient listening can help with cognitive overload

There’s one thing that medical professionals from every specialty and size of practice agree on: Modern healthcare can be overwhelming. Phones ring incessantly, the fax inbox seems always to be full, and scheduling and seeing patients is only half the battle — all those visits need to be properly documented, and notes reviewed for accuracy before being added to each patient’s record.

As the pace and complexity of healthcare have grown in recent decades, technologies have been developed to help doctors cope. Leading the way, of course, is the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which is now all but ubiquitous in practices across the U.S.

But the EHR has been a mixed blessing.

For example, this 2018 Health Policy report identified the challenges that come with switching to an EHR. Providers often experience a short-term decrease in efficiency as they move from paper records to an EHR, or even when they switch from one EHR to another.

The EHR is great, but working faster isn’t always working smarter

Doctor talking to patient holding device

Once accustomed to a new technology, providers tend to see gains in efficiency. But the ability to do things more quickly sometimes tempts practices into doing too much, introducing a new set of challenges, including the belief that doctors can multitask without impacting the quality of care.

Studies suggest otherwise.

A March 2017 report in Applied Ergonomics, for example, pointed to the negative effects of multitasking on performance among clinicians. The study focused on a German hospital, where providers, while correctly perceiving that they were under additional stress when multitasking, erroneously rated their work performance higher when evidence suggested it was lower.

And, as Patrick J. Skerrett wrote in a 2012 blog for Harvard Health Publishing, “Doctors, nurses, and other health-care professionals are busy folks. It’s understandable that they resort to multitasking. But it doesn’t guarantee the best medical care.”

Sunoh.ai: Addressing the healthcare time crunch

Fortunately, there are alternatives to multitasking or working more and more hours. The advent of advanced, AI-powered medical scribes, such as Sunoh.ai, has given physicians a powerful tool for improving efficiency and resisting the temptation to multitask.

Medical scribes are nothing new, of course. Humans have long filled that role, helping relieve doctors of the burdens of documentation by taking detailed notes or transcribing the content of visits. But Sunoh goes far beyond what human scribes can do, using ambient listening technology and natural language processing to create a detailed record of the patient encounter and allowing the doctor to focus on the patient.

“One of the things that I value most about using Sunoh,” said Kylee Johnson, owner of Rocky Mountain Women’s Clinic in Idaho Falls, Idaho, “is it allows me to stay face-to-face and very actively engaged in my patient conversation without trying to manage documentation at the same time or feeling I’m losing that connection with my patient by having the computer in between us during our conversations.”

Ambient listening and the promise of the AI medical scribe

Improving the quality of the patient encounter matters because it helps support doctors in their mission to be true caregivers rather than trying to talk to a patient, type on a computer, answer the patient’s questions, and formulate a treatment plan all at once.

With the power of AI on their side, physicians can make some progress in winning back at least a few hours each day.

How serious is the time crunch?

According to American Medical Association insurance data, doctors work on average 55 hours per week, with surgeons and those in residency programs working the most hours.

And an August 2020 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that 28.4% of doctors’ time was spent either on EHR input alone or administrative activities.

Taken together, those studies suggest doctors are spending about 15 hours every week on some combination of EHR data entry and administrative work. That figure is echoed by a Medscape study from 2023, referenced in Becker’s Hospital Review, which found that physicians on average spend 15.5 hours per week on paperwork and administration, of which nine hours are on EHR documentation alone.

How a Texas practice is solving the documentation backlog

“The problem we had with the traditional method of charting,” said Michael Tackitt, Director of Operations at Brownfield Regional Medical Center in Texas, “is you have the option to either sit there and type on a computer and halfway ignore your patient whenever you’re charting and trying to take care of them at the same time, or you had the option of doing it after the fact where, you know you would take a few quick notes and chart at a later date.”

The result, Tackitt said, is a less complete chart and a backlog of work.

“Then you’re constantly running behind,” he said. “I think the best part of it that my providers love is that they could hit ‘Play’ and then take care of their patient rather than worry about taking notes or typing on the computer. And then they would turn around and have a very complete and very robust chart.”

Completing notes more quickly than ever

“Since using Sunoh.ai, I’m actually able to see a patient, order what they need, and finish the documentation practically before the patient is out of the door,” said Dr. Annie Reinertsen of South Shore Family Practice in Marquette, Michigan. “It’s listening in real time, and by the time I walk out of the exam room, the note is basically complete with just a few small edits.”

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Sunoh has indeed become faster and faster in the year since it was introduced and is now trusted by more than 75,000 physicians from every kind and size of medical practice.

The ‘Gawande Rule’: Don’t ever skip the documentation

For all its speed and power, however, Sunoh remains an AI-powered tool that must be employed responsibly by providers. While the draft notes that it produces may be very good, they remain drafts. No documentation — whether created by a human or AI — should ever be made a permanent part of a patient’s record until it has been reviewed by a qualified medical provider for clinical accuracy.

For providers, it pays to bear in mind the work of noted surgeon and author Atul Gawande, whose book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right notes: “The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.”

Conclusion: The cure for technology is more technology

And what’s true of knowledge is also true of healthcare IT technology: It has both saved medicine and, in some ways, burdened providers with additional work. The key is to choose wisely, selecting those solutions that represent a net gain in time and work-life balance, without ever compromising the quality of care provided or patient safety.

In short, the cure for technology’s woes is more technology — as long as it’s better technology.

To learn more about Sunoh.ai or arrange a demo, visit sunoh.ai.