Grappling with excessive AI clinical documentation
Imagine this offer: For every eight hours you put in at the office, you are required to work an additional six hours. Here’s a catch: You will not only have to work those six hours for free, but they will actually cut into your personal and family time. Almost every night.
Who would ever accept such an offer? Well, medical specialists would and do, just about every day. They do so because they often have no other method for completing their daily documentation. When there’s work that has to be done — and documentation is at the top of every provider’s to-do list — you spend whatever time you must to complete it.
Recognizing the Cognitive and Emotional Load Providers Face
That average of an additional six hours per day comes from a September 2024 report from the American Medical Association. The report identified specialties that demand even more of the doctor’s time beyond the eight-hour workday: including 7.3 hours for every eight hours of clinic time for primary care physicians, 7.5 hours for nephrologists, 7.7 hours for endocrinologists, and 8.4 hours for infectious disease practitioners.
Even those specialists who are below the six-hour average are spending two, three, or four extra hours each day on paperwork.
A November 2018 article in The New Yorker by surgeon and author Atul Gawande, “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers,” cited a 2016 study that found doctors were spending half their daily clinical time — when they were meeting with and trying to understand patients — simply staring a screen, and additional hours each evening to finish up their notes.
“Something’s gone terribly wrong,” Gawande wrote. “Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.”
How an AI-powered Medical Scribe Fights Back
To address the documentation challenges faced by doctors, including providers in every medical specialty, healthcare IT companies have introduced solutions that leverage artificial intelligence. The basic idea is as simple as it is familiar: The cure for the ills of technology is more technology.
But that isn’t quite the right answer. More technology alone may add to the complexity of healthcare without addressing the cognitive, emotional, and time burdens mentioned above. The key is to introduce the right technology, improving performance without adding complexity or making providers’ workflows more onerous than they already are.
Sunoh.ai’s medical scribe achieves that balance, using ambient listening technology and natural language processing to generate draft clinical notes and streamline practice workflows.
How Sunoh Meets Specialists’ Varying Needs
AI medical software should prioritize ease of use and provide valuable insights into patient populations, rather than focusing solely on technological sophistication. Sunoh.ai helps providers achieve deeper insights into their patients by creating highly accurate clinical notes that can be tailored to many medical specialties.
- For general and family medicine practitioners, Sunoh generates draft Progress Notes, focusing on the History of Present Illness (HPI) and placing all relevant clinical information in the correct section of the note.
- Orthopedists and dermatologists can also use Sunoh for documentation and enjoy additional options. Orthopedists can mark observations on a homunculus model, while dermatologists can annotate a 3D hot-spotted model to record the exact location of a given observation, adding notes and marking something for further investigation or a follow-up check.
- Dental practices can use Sunoh to speed the periocharting process, enabling hygienists to complete that work without having to have a second person in the room. And Sunoh can also help dentists record observations during an exam and help them formulate treatment plans.
- Vision providers using Sunoh can easily make their observations and measurements and record them in tabular form.
- Sunoh is also useful for behavioral and mental health providers, generating SOAP notes and creating transcripts that capture the subtleties and nuances of the patient-provider encounter, all details that can be critical for shaping patient care.
Accuracy, Compassion, and Quality Care in Every Specialty
Whether a practice focuses on pediatrics, OB/GYN, allergy and immunology, neurology, or any of dozens of other medical specialties, it needs healthcare IT tools that are as capable as the providers using them.
Sunoh’s AI medical scribe stands out as a leading solution because it can reduce the burdens of documentation for any kind of practice and allows providers to focus on their patients. By embracing innovative solutions like Sunoh.ai and prioritizing the needs of providers and patients, the healthcare industry can achieve better outcomes and ensure a balance between technology and the human touch in medical care.
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Sunoh AI medical scribe meets the needs of providers of every size and specialty, helping save hours on daily documentation, time practices can use to improve work-life balance.
