Role of AI Medical Scribes in Urgent Care, Critical Care, Pain Management Practices
The stethoscope was invented in Paris, France way back in 1816, and has long been used as a symbol for medical practice. Innumerable photographs, icons, and line drawings have used the time-honored stethoscope as a stand-in for providing medical care of all kinds — even when no actual stethoscope is in sight.
There is an excellent reason for that. Stethoscopes, after all, are used to listen to the internal sounds of the body — the medical term is auscultation — and there is hardly a better way to describe the care and professionalism that medical professionals aim for than listening to what’s on the inside of the body.
“Stethoscope time,” then, is simply our way of describing what should go on (sometimes more often than it does!) at any medical practice, whether it is family medicine, an urgent care facility, or a specialty such as pediatrics, orthopedics, cardiology, or pain management.
Simply put, the more time doctors spend listening to their patients — both to their words and what’s taking place inside their bodies — the higher the quality of care and the better medical outcomes are likely to be.
Like most medical devices, stethoscopes have been improved and refined over the years, taking advantage of tremendous advances in technology. There are now electronic and computer-aided stethoscopes.
And, thanks to technology, today’s medical providers can increase their “stethoscope time” in ways that their medical ancestors could never have imagined, including ones that involve no stethoscope at all.
One of the most important ways is through medical scribe technology powered by artificial intelligence.
AI-powered medical scribes such as that from Sunoh.ai help reduce the burdens and headaches associated with medical documentation. Listening to the patient during the encounter is both art and science, demanding the physician take note of precise clinical observations without losing sight of the overall symptoms and messages the patient is sending — which often demand paying careful attention to the patient’s tone of voice and body language.
Physicians often find that they cannot do both as effectively as they would like, leaving them to spend hours of each day trying to recall clinical details and complete their Progress Notes.
With Sunoh.ai, they have an AI-powered medical scribe that creates an accurate draft Progress Note and transcript for each visit, capturing clinical details and giving them a head start on their documentation.
Such technology permits providers to focus on the patient rather than a keyboard or computer screen. That, in turn, can mean higher patient satisfaction and a lower risk of provider burnout since doctors are able to complete documentation sooner, get home on time, and pay more attention to achieving the right work/life balance.
