A Potentially Transformative Step in Medical History

AI medical scribes could heal some healthcare ills

In recent years, doctors have faced the reality that some of the ills they face are those afflicting healthcare itself — excessive paperwork, onerous regulations, increasing patient loads, and the challenges of daily documentation.

The good news is that remarkable technologies are helping doctors get back to the personalized attention and caring epitomized by the family doctor who, armed with only a large black bag, used to make house calls.

One of those helpful technologies is the AI-powered medical scribe.

Turning points in medical history

Released in late 2023, Sunoh.ai™ has grown rapidly and is now trusted by more than 80,000 physicians nationwide — encompassing every medical specialty — to help them with their daily clinical documentation.

At one level, it’s easy to see why: Sunoh is EHR-agnostic, which simply means that it can be used with any Electronic Health Record system. It relies on ambient listening technology and natural language processing (NLP) to capture the clinical details of a patient-provider encounter and produce a draft note. It’s fast, cost-effective, and useful for any medical specialty.

But the deeper question is why those features have gained such traction in today’s marketplace. After all, there are lots of similar products in the healthcare marketplace, where competition and change are a daily reality.

Echoing how medical history unfolds

The answer has to do with medical history.

In her 2024 book “The History of Medicine in Twelve Objects,” Dr. Carol Cooper focuses on items that played crucial roles in advancing medicine.

Her first example, the trephine — used to make holes in the skull — may seem medieval and outmoded today. Indeed, a trephine is, in Dr. Cooper’s words, “very near the top of the list” of things no one should try at home.

But the trephine played an important role in doctors’ first stumbling efforts to understand the human brain, the impact of injuries, and how they might better deal with them. However crudely, it led over the course of many years to today’s neurosurgery procedures, replete with anesthesia, highly sensitive imaging devices, and the near miracles worked by skilled surgeons.

Dr. Cooper’s other examples, which include the microscope, the stethoscope, the hypodermic needle, and the heart-lung machine, all played key roles in moving medicine from an age of mystery, hopes, and prayers, to one in which science, surgery, and precision medications have given millions of humans the opportunity to live longer and better lives.

Can the AI medical scribe make history, too?

Telling the history of medicine through objects could be a longer or slightly different story than Dr. Cooper’s. One could focus on the development of penicillin, the discovery of the structure of DNA, or the sequencing of much of the human genome.

Someday, historians of medicine might include personalized genomic medicine, quantum computing, or new methods to analyze population-level health data.

So, why is a simple solution such as the Sunoh.ai medical scribe of such importance?

Because it is simple, inexpensive, broadly applicable, and here now.

Unlike so many other breakthroughs in medicine, Sunoh doesn’t require billions of dollars in investment, huge laboratories, or prohibitively expensive clinical trials. The algorithms it depends upon have been proven across dozens of disciplines. And Sunoh offers outstanding performance at a cost far less than that of hiring human scribes.

Why it matters

The ultimate test of any new technology is whether it lasts long enough to gain acceptance and shows results. While ambient listening medical scribes are still relative newcomers on the medical stage, there is good reason to think they will play a permanent role in medicine.

For starters, the doctor-patient encounter is at the heart of every medical specialty. Direct communication between the patient and another human being with the training and empathy to help them is a difficult model to beat.

Next, when you consider the importance of data in medicine — for diagnoses, patient safety, measuring outcomes, determining reimbursements, and much more — documentation seems a good bet to be a permanent feature in healthcare.

Naturally, then, better ways to achieve documentation — at lower cost and in less time — are likely to gain an ever-larger share of the marketplace.

It’s not that humans cannot document care. They can and have done so very well for centuries. But the pace and complexity of today’s healthcare is forcing the industry to adopt new solutions to the age-old challenge of documentation.

Technologies that can meet that challenge cost effectively and at scale — such as the best AI medical scribes can — are likely not only to endure but also to reshape the history of medicine.

Next steps

Is your practice ready to take another step toward the future of medicine? Learn more about Sunoh by clicking here.