AI for medical documentation frees doctors from the keyboard
athenahealth's Chadd Dodd, VP of product management, shares how AI for medical documentation is flipping the script on health IT use, supporting healthcare's human touch.
Physicians have been hunched over keyboards, their eyes fixed on screens instead of patients. But 2025 promises to break this cycle as artificial intelligence finally delivers on the original promise of electronic health records -- returning the human touch to healthcare while AI for medical documentation handles the paperwork.
"2025 is a pivotal year for health IT because of the capabilities of technology we're giving to our physicians so they can spend more time with their patients," says Chad Dodd, vice president of product management at athenahealth.
Health IT systems, particularly in the form of the EHR, have long promised to support physicians' time with patients. However, many systems have not lived up to their promises, instead adding an administrative burden to clinicians and contributing to rising levels of burnout. In fact, physicians have cited EHR workloads specifically as a leading cause of dissatisfaction and burnout.
Thanks to advancements in AI for medical documentation, the tide may be turning for clinicians and their digital helpers.
"The promise of the EHR was that we could pass digital records across patients and physicians. We would understand a patient and their background and then be able to easily communicate any changes and the care that's needed," Dodd explained. "However, when we made that transition in 2010 and all the way up until recently, we did that on the backs of physicians because someone had to enter all that data in. So, we asked the physician to do it."
"It's not until large language models and generative AI," Dodd continued, "that we're now able to take the physician-patient conversation, create a summary, create a note and automatically insert that into the encounter so that the physician doesn't have to type it. That's game-changing."
Using ambient clinical intelligence
Ambient clinical intelligence is one of the most significant use cases for AI in healthcare right now. AI and voice recognition technology can automatically generate clinical notes during clinical encounters, transcribe them and draft clinical notes for patient charts.
AI tools that can even capture a bilingual conversation between a physician and patient and translate it completely to English to put in the patient's chart, Dodd explained.
Physicians are also the most comfortable using AI in this fashion, and it is driving better outcomes for physicians and patients.
"What we've seen in the results is absolutely incredible," Dodd stated. "It's reduced overall documentation time. It's improved same-day encounter close rates. It's given back physician time so they can spend time with their family, and it's given them a new set of optimism in the overall healthcare ecosystem."
2025 is a pivotal year for health IT because of the capabilities of technology we're giving to our physicians so they can spend more time with their patients.
Chad Dodd, VP of product management, athenahealth
According to athenahealth's 2025 "Physician Sentiment Survey," fewer physicians believe AI to be overhyped or unable to meet expectations (27%, down from 40% in 2024). Only about a third (31%) of physicians were concerned that AI was something else that would complicate healthcare (down from 42% in 2024).
Not only is ambient clinical intelligence improving physician efficiency and well-being, but it also enhances patient care, Dodd stated.
"Patients are enjoying the fact that they're able to have that visit with their physician, be able to look at them eye-to-eye and have a discussion, as opposed to having a computer between them and having the physician typing away during the conversation," he said.
Still, many physicians (61%) expressed concerns about the potential loss of human touch as a result of AI adoption.
Addressing concerns about AI for medical documentation
AI for medical documentation is continuing to evolve to address physician concerns. In particular, vendors like athenahealth are prioritizing purposefully built products to align with the specific workflows of healthcare providers. For example, athenahealth recently released athenaOne®, designed specifically for community health centers.
Community health center needs differ from the needs of an ambulatory surgical center or an urgent care center. These providers need integrated workflows across all the service lines they manage, including medical, behavioral health, OB and women's health, as well as dental. They also need to access data from hospitals, health systems and other health centers across the U.S. to get that longitudinal record of patient care, Dodd explained.
"We try to tailor our work to fit the needs of the practices and the physicians," he added. Clinical notes generated by AI for medical documentation are also "purpose-built and tailored specifically to [individual] conversations," he said.
Dodd also advocated for a "partnership model" between users and the vendor. Community health centers, in particular, need the backing of dedicated customer support teams to implement and optimize health IT use. These providers typically do not have the bandwidth to add extensive IT training to their busy schedules. Vendors can provide individual support and, in some cases, identify physician users who may need more support based on their activity within the EHR system.
"We give reports -- an analytical set of insight tools -- to the administrative team so they can see, which physicians are spending more time documenting, which physicians might have more new patient cases or patient inbound emails, which physicians have more requests for information and a growing backlog that needs assistance," Dodd explained. "We can also identify which physicians are using the accelerators and which ones aren't and could benefit from additional coaching training to make sure that they're seeing the benefits of the technology there."
"That insight comes with a partnership," he emphasized.
Health IT delivers on its promise
What makes 2025 particularly significant for health IT use, especially AI use in healthcare, is the convergence of mature AI technologies ready for clinical implementation and extensive digitized medical data accumulated since the adoption of EHRs. AI for medical documentation is making a real impact for physicians, and it's not stopping here.
"We're starting on notes, but we can now do draft orders, medication [recommendations], diagnoses," Dodd said. "We can provide nudges to the physician that say: 'Have you considered these conversations to improve the therapy and treatment decisions you're providing?' All of that we can do in real time with new AI, new technologies that are available today that didn't exist before. That's why it's a change [from health IT use in the past]."
Health IT is at the point where it can create more comprehensive medical charts for physicians based on data from not only its own EHR system and other health IT platforms but those across the street, state or even country.
"Now, with a combination of not only that data and access to data that we can connect with but put AI on the top of it and you can connect the dots across disparate data points to provide a summary to that patient, to provide insights to the physician, which they really haven't had before," Dodd said.
AI in medical documentation brings that information forward to the physician so they don't have to hunt for the data they need for patient care. It can surface the information with links back to the source, whether it's lab results, a medication order or an X-ray. And that saves time and makes clinical care simpler and easier for physicians, according to Dodd.
"And that's what physicians have been asking for," he stated. "Help me leverage technology to connect the dots across all this information and data that's been digitized over years."
Jacqueline LaPointe is a graduate of Brandeis University and King's College London. She has been writing about healthcare finance and revenue cycle management since 2016.
