New Tebra research finds that nearly two-thirds of providers spend an hour or more a day on documentation. That’s every day. Too often, the work spills after hours, into providers’ evenings and weekends. 

But the workload costs providers more than just time. It also costs them attention. In fact, 45% of providers say clerical work leaves them with less attention for patient care. 

Creating documentation involves a lot of repetitive work, which means that many providers are turning to AI to handle some of those tasks. Yet since so much of the clinical record becomes input for what happens next – prescriptions, claims, patient follow up, and future care – providers still need to own it.

In our recent webinar, Less clerical, more clinical: Put AI to work to see more patients, Tebra’s Miriam Datskovsky and Michael Stern explored this tension: How can providers use AI to reclaim time and attention for patients while ensuring their clinical judgment remains front and center?

Clinical documentation is not a single task. Rather, it’s a series of tasks that begins before the patient enters the room and continues after the encounter ends. 

AI works best when it takes on specific, defined tasks that can be readily reviewed by a person. Within clinical documentation, that means that AI is well suited to:

With AI streamlining these tasks, the provider can apply clinical judgment at each step: reviewing and editing the note, evaluating suggested diagnosis codes, confirming prescription details, and ensuring the final documentation accurately reflects the encounter. 

That division of labor can give providers more room to focus on what only they can do: listen to the patient, solve problems, and apply their expertise and judgment. Nearly half (49%) of providers using AI documentation solutions say they get more face-to-face time with patients.  

Consider a typical patient encounter. Imagine you’re meeting a 60-year-old patient, Debra, with a complex medical history. She usually sees the other provider in your practice, but today, that colleague is out and you’re stepping in. You need to quickly understand her history without digging through years of notes.  

AI can pull the most relevant information into a summary, including recent notes, problems, medications, and labs. Instead of reconstructing Debra’s history from scratch, you can quickly orient yourself and drill down where you need more detail. You’re better prepared to ask the right questions, listen to her concerns, and provide continuity of care.  

But that’s only possible because the existing documentation was good. The information that AI summarizes has to be reliable in the first place.  

The clinical note doesn’t stay with the provider who wrote it. It can help the next provider understand what happened. It can support the claims tied to the encounter. And it can drive follow-up actions, including medication orders.  

That’s why human review is more than a safeguard to make providers comfortable with AI. It helps maintain accountability as information moves into other clinical and operational workflows. 

In Tebra’s AI Note Assist workflow, for example, AI can prepare a medication order based on the encounter, but the provider still reviews the medication, dosage, and instructions before prescribing. AI does the prep work, while the clinical decision stays with the provider.  

AI’s potential in clinical care goes beyond creating a note. 

Think about the full spectrum of a patient encounter. Before the visit, AI can surface relevant information from the chart to help the provider prepare more efficiently. During the encounter, it can capture the conversation and create structured documentation without forcing the provider to divide their attention between the patient and a screen. Afterward, it can help prepare documentation and follow-up tasks for provider review. 

This shifts the question that practices should be asking. Instead of thinking, “How quickly can AI write my notes?” providers should consider, “Where is repetitive work taking time and attention away from my time? And where can AI safely take on more tasks?”

The goal is to move repetitive work into the background so providers can keep their attention, expertise, and judgment front and center. 

Want to see what that looks like across a real patient encounter? Watch the on-demand webinar, Less clerical, more clinical: Put AI to work to see more patients, to see Tebra AI in action. 

Ready to consider bringing Tebra AI into your own practice? Schedule your personalized demo to see how Tebra’s AI solutions can fit into your existing workflows.