If you’re a healthcare professional, you know that documentation can be one of the most time-consuming parts of your day. The average physician spends hours on administrative tasks, often every day, on top of their patient visits. This administrative workload has fueled great interest in tools designed to take the note-writing burden off their plate.
And that’s where dictation software and medical AI scribes come in. Here’s the difference between the dictation tools and the top AI scribes, when AI is your best bet, and how to get started for free.
What Is Medical Dictation Software?
Medical Dictation software, quite simply, converts speech into text in real time. When the physician speaks, the software listens and generates a word-for-word transcription. Tools in the medical dictation category have been around for decades and are essentially a sophisticated voice-to-text engine.
Medical dictation software handles accents reasonably well, but it’s not perfect. Some products also integrate with electronic health records to enable dictation directly into clinical notes. The physician is required to narrate the appointment into the software and review and edit the final transcription, often having to greatly slim down the conversation to the relevant points. The end result is a physician who remains quite hands-on but can work faster than they would if typing notes by hand.
What Is a Medical AI Scribe?
Like a dictation software, an AI scribe listens to patient appointments and generates notes in real time. But it goes even further. Instead of transcribing word-for-word from the physician, an AI scribe listens to the entire encounter and creates a structured clinical note containing only the relevant details. The large language model formats the conversation and ensures it adheres to the appropriate template based on the physician's preference or specialty.
Yes, a physician should still review the final output, but there’s no need to heavily edit the wall of text that a typical dictation software provides. Medical AI scribes are also better suited to noisy environments and to physicians and patients with accents.
Medical Dictation Software: The Pros
Traditional dictation software has earned its place among clinical workflows for good reasons. Here are some of the perks:
- It’s fast and reliable: Dictation software listens and transcribes in real time.
- The physician is in full control: The end transcription isn’t finalized or sent anywhere without the physician’s sign-off.
- There’s minimal friction in adoption: Many practices already use dictation software to some extent, meaning the learning curve is minimal at the practice-wide level.
It’s also predictable in high-stakes contexts. Because it’s been used for so long, many healthcare professionals can predict how it will respond in any and every environment.
AI Medical Scribes: The Pros
Medical dictation software requires close narration from the doctor during the appointment, but an AI medical scribe solves that problem. Here are the pros:
- Ambient listening: AI medical scribes listen to the entire appointment. This way, the physician is freed up to focus on the patient.
- It adds what is relevant: AI scribes can distinguish between idle small talk and important medical topics and retain only what the physician may deem important.
- Greater time savings: While it still requires physician oversight, the edit-and-review process is much shorter with an AI scribe.
- Clean notes beat plain dictation: AI medical scribe users can set templates based on specialty or preference, and SOAP notes, progress notes, and discharge summaries are made easy.
- Clinical decision support: Structured medical AI outputs are better suited for clinical decision management tools. Physicians can simply paste the note in, ask a clinical question, and get context-rich guidance and recommendations.
AI is becoming increasingly popular in healthcare, and using effective, HIPAA-compliant AI could mean reduced administrative workload and ultimately less burnout.
When to Choose an AI Scribe
AI medical scribes are well-suited for high-volume practices where documentation speed matters. Primary care physicians, hospital professionals, and urgent care providers who see a large number of patients could gain the most from AI scribe technology.
They’re also a great fit for medical students and resident doctors. Residents in particular are under enormous documentation pressure, and are often responsible for highly detailed notes across multiple patient encounters. An AI scribe reduces that burden by enabling the resident to review and sign off, rather than manually type or heavily edit a too-lengthy transcript from conventional dictation software.
For many clinicians, the note-writing tasks follow them home. But for resident doctors and clinicians looking to reduce administrative workload, AI scribes are ideal.
How Doximity Stands Apart From the Competition
Some medical AI scribes do just that; they offer ambient documentation functionality, and they do it well. But these are siloed documentation tools, whereas tools like Doximity function as comprehensive clinical AI suites. This distinction matters for physicians evaluating what is actually needed from their digital tooling.
Doximity is a secure, HIPAA-compliant software platform that’s free to use and offers the full AI infrastructure of a physician's software toolkit.
- Doximity Ask is an intuitive clinical decision management tool that supports evidence surfacing and synthesis, documentation, and more.
- Doximity Dialer is a secure telehealth platform that supports text, voice, and video calls while keeping physicians' phone numbers private.
- Doximity Scribe is the medical AI scribe that live-records patient appointments, generates a structured clinical note, and safely discards original recordings.
Doximity also offers free PDFs to medical journals, drug monograph data, and even HIPAA-compliant fax service. A physician using a standalone AI scribe app will still need separate tooling for clinical reference, telehealth, synthesizing the latest in medical research, and patient communication. But with Doximity, clinicians can access all the functionality they need and have it work seamlessly together.
Get Doximity for Your Practice Today
Whether a clinician is looking to reduce administrative burden, improve clinical decision support, or better document patient appointments, Doximity offers a solution. Over 85% of licensed physicians in the U.S. are already registered members, and getting started with Doximity Scribe, Ask, or Dialer only requires signing up with valid healthcare credentials.