I recently caught up with a longtime friend, a physician who also owns and runs a private practice. Given how much AI has occupied my thinking lately, our conversation drifted there almost immediately: how are we actually using it?
His answer surprised me. He and many of his colleagues had already adopted AI, and not through some enterprise rollout or expensive new platform. They were using Doximity. With the Doximity mobile app, they transcribe appointments right in the room. No more typing. No more scribbling copious notes. No more paying for an in-room scribe. The app records the conversation, the AI engine summarizes it, and hours of charting collapse into minutes.
Why This Caught My Attention
As an IT provider who specializes in supporting doctors, medical practices, and hospitals, I found this genuinely fascinating. Here was a group of forward-thinking physicians quietly reclaiming the one thing they never seem to have enough of: time with their patients.
If you have ever sat in an exam room while a doctor pored over chart notes or hand-typed them while you waited, you know the feeling. Their attention is split down the middle: half on your care, half on data entry. It is not their fault. It is the system they have been handed.
We Have Had Transcription for Years – This Is Different
Let me be clear: audio recording and transcription are not new. We have had them for decades. From the handheld tape recorders that someone had to manually transcribe, to the more modern tools that train on a doctor’s voice and spit out verbatim text files, there have always been options that beat handwriting or typing from scratch.
But those “solutions” carried a hidden cost. They created hours of work every single evening. The doctor would take the raw transcription, copy and paste it into the patient’s chart, and then begin the real labor: summarizing, clarifying, and correcting. Verbatim text is not a chart note – it is a pile of words someone still has to shape into one.
If you have ever run a help desk for physicians, you know exactly where this goes. You have taken the midnight calls from doctors trying to close out their charts while wrestling with a computer problem. The cloud of late-night charting hangs over the profession like a storm they can see coming. They know it is arriving. It is simply a fact of life. So they hunker down and push through.
And the worst part? The next time they see that patient, they get to decipher their own notes. Hopefully the notes made sense. Hopefully past conditions were referenced. Hopefully the most recent entry is clear enough to walk into the room already knowing what to discuss and what to ask – without digging back through years of history all over again.
Enter AI
This is where things change.
The AI engine transcribes and summarizes. It takes questions asked out of context and puts them back in context. It takes conversations that bounce from topic to topic and reorders them into something coherent. It builds a picture that is condensed, covers the important parts of the patient’s history, and hands it to the doctor ready to use.
And the next visit? The doctor, either manually or automatically, can have AI review the full history: every chart note since the dawn of time, current and past labs, MyChart messages, and more. In a matter of moments, they have a clear picture of what is going on before they ever walk into the room.
Why This Matters to Me as a Patient
I have never been a doctor. But I have been a patient more times than I care to admit, and I appreciate this deeply.
Nothing frustrates me more than showing up to an appointment and hearing, “So, why are we seeing you today?” – from the very doctor who ordered the labs, the X-rays, or the MRI that clearly flagged the problems in the first place.
Think about it from the other side. As a professional technician, the doctors I support would not be pleased if I showed up at their computer – for a ticket they submitted – and opened with “So, what appears to be the problem?” They want me informed and working the issue immediately. I want exactly the same from my doctors.
And now, doctors who adopt AI can offer precisely that: informed, prepared, present care – without the dread of late-night charting hanging over them.
The Real Payoff
Sounds to me like doctoring is becoming more personal again, and maybe even more enjoyable for the heroes in the white coats. When the administrative weight lifts, what is left is the reason most of them went into medicine in the first place: the patient in front of them.
That is a future worth supporting – and at ArcLight, it is exactly the kind of forward step we love to help our medical clients take.
Brian Largent
Father to five, husband to one, founder, CEO, and all around swell fella (or so I'm told)
