In modern healthcare, physician burnout remains a major challenge. Packed inboxes, long documentation and charting processes, and other mounting administrative demands mean many clinicians spend more time on their computers than caring for patients.
Artificial intelligence has been increasingly positioned as a way to help. While it won’t replace clinician judgment, it can surface relevant medical literature, take on repetitive tasks, and streamline communication. In this article, we’ll uncover what AI for physicians can do, which tool types are most popular, and five of the top platforms currently available on the market.
What Are AI Tools For Physicians?
AI tools for physicians are software platforms that use natural language processing, machine learning, and automation to support clinical and administrative workflows. The goal here is to reduce manual tasks, boost efficiency, support clinical reference, and reduce overall burnout.
Of course, a physician’s judgment remains the source of truth. AI tooling should simply serve as assistants, helping clinicians work effectively while maintaining a stronger focus on the point of care. As AI adoption grows, physicians are increasingly using AI tooling to save time, reduce cognitive overload, and enjoy a better work-life balance.
Popular Tool Types For Streamlined Workflows
Healthcare AI tooling falls into a few major categories.
- AI-powered scribes: Scribe tools listen to patient visits and generate clinical notes from the recording. This reduces manual charting time and enables the physician to better focus on the patient in person rather than taking notes by hand while listening.
- Clinical decision support and management: These tools provide evidence-based recommendations, reminders, and treatment guidance at the point of care.
- Clinical evidence surfacing: Using AI to summarize medical literature and surface the latest in clinical evidence, these tools are quickly becoming a clinician’s go-to for asking clinical questions.
- Document drafting: Documentation tools help physicians create handoff notes, referral letters, and patient communication when provided with appointment context.
- Telehealth: Physicians use telehealth platforms to call, text, and video call patients for convenient, mobile healthcare.
Here are the most popular platforms that offer one or more of these features today.
The Top 5 AI Tools For Reducing Clinician Burnout
1. Doximity
Doximity offers physicians not just one or two AI features, but rather a unified clinical AI suite. With telehealth, AI scribe functionality, documentation support, clinical evidence surfacing, decision management, and more, it’s the most well-rounded AI software on our list. On top of that, it’s free to use.
Doximity Ask provides evidence-based clinical answers to plain-language prompts, with over 10,000 outputs verified by a licensed physician. Doximity Scribe live-records patient appointments, generating a succinct summary before safely discarding the original recording. And Doximity Dialer enables physicians to call, text, and video call patients while keeping their personal phone numbers private.
With intuitively integrated tooling, physicians can use Scribe within Dialer and paste notes into Ask to receive context-rich, evidence-based answers and recommendations.
Key benefits include:
- HIPAA-compliant tooling
- Secure physician communication
- Mobile support
- Drug monographs
- Free PDFs to top medical journals
- HIPAA-compliant fax
- PeerCheck™ and citations
Doximity is also the most recommended platform for resident physicians. It can assist students and resident doctors with role-play, surfacing medical literature, recording practice scenarios, and preparing them for on-the-spot testing by superiors. And because it’s free, it’s accessible to medical students and clinicians alike.
2. Open Evidence
OpenEvidence is a popular AI-driven medical product, made to help clinicians easily access evidence-based literature during patient appointments. Instead of manually searching through lengthy databases and journals, physicians can simply ask questions in plain language and receive answers in seconds.
Key benefits include
- HIPAA compliance
- Rapid literature review and decision support
- Medical question answering
- Staying updated on the latest medical research
While OpenEvidence is HIPAA-compliant, free, and effective, it doesn’t quite have the full range of benefits a tool like Doximity would. Drug monograph data is limited, telehealth functionality is rigid, and simple workflow conveniences such as free PDFs are unavailable. Users also cite, on popular forum websites, that the surfaced answers aren’t always relevant to the given prompt. Overall, it’s a handy, trusted tool, but it might leave busy physicians with workflow gaps.
3. Freed
Freed is a popular ambient scribe software designed to reduce documentation burnout. The software listens to and records patient visits, generating a structured summary that physicians can review and edit as needed.
Key benefits include:
- Hands-free appointment recording
- Automatic note generation
- Simple editing functionality
While it is HIPAA-compliant, Freed is not a free service. It’s also effective as an AI scribe, but its product capabilities are narrow. If physicians are looking for documentation support, clinical decision management, telehealth, or anything else workflow-assistant-related, they will have to look elsewhere to fill the digital gaps.
4. UpToDate AI
Another widely trusted software on our list is UpToDate. UpToDate has been a medical software platform for decades, and the new AI functionality enables faster retrieval of medical literature than ever before. Physicians can use it for evidence-based guidance, diagnostic support, and treatment recommendations, all in a conversational AI setting.
Key benefits include:
- Evidence-based literature surfacing
- Clinical guidance in seconds
- HIPAA-compliant platform
- Specialty support
UpToDate has similar clinical decision support capabilities to OpenEvidence and Doximity. It is worth noting, however, that it can cost practices hundreds of dollars per seat. Also, because it’s primarily used as a GPT-like workflow assistant, UpToDate is another example of a trusted, intuitive tool with a narrow offering.
5. Heidi
And last but not least is Heidi. This rapidly growing AI medical scribe tool is built to reduce administrative burden, much like Freed. Heidi listens to patient appointments and auto-generates structured notes post-visit. The platform supports templates and customization, allowing physicians to fine-tune the notes to their preferred documentation style or specialty.
Key benefits include:
- Record of note completion times
- Flexible templates and note structure
- HIPAA compliance
- Seamless recording time
Another trusted app, Heidi, is also free to use, but deeper evidence-based functionality access remains behind a paywall. Once the notes are generated, they do also require a physician review and potential edit. And while it is effective at scribe work, clinicians using Heidi will need additional tooling to build out a full clinical AI suite.
Get Doximity For Free Today
For physicians looking to improve workflow efficiency and put more care back into each appointment, Doximity offers a well-rounded solution.
It’s HIPAA-compliant, secure, and free to use. And by combining Dialer, Scribe, and Ask, physicians can reduce some of the burnout that comes with administrative duties. Over 85% of U.S. physicians are already registered Doximity users, and signing up is as easy as creating an account with your valid healthcare credentials.