Ambient scribing gets most of the attention when clinicians talk about AI in the exam room. And for good reason, it’s one of the most tangible, immediately impactful technologies to ever enter clinical practice. But there’s a quieter, equally significant problem that AI is now starting to solve: what happens before a provider ever walks into the room.
Pre-charting. And for most clinicians, it’s a significant, largely invisible drain on their day.
Before a provider sees a patient, the provider prepares by reviewing previous visit notes, checking recent labs, scanning the problem list, and looking through active medications. The goal is to walk into the encounter fully informed, understanding what’s changed, what needs follow-up, and what the priorities are for this patient.
Done well, pre-charting enables better care. A physician who’s done their homework before stepping into the room can be more present with the patient, ask more targeted questions, and make more confident clinical decisions. The preparation is the foundation for everything that follows.
The problem is that it takes time. A lot of it.
In a typical outpatient setting, pre-charting for even simple patient encounters can take 10 minutes or more. For a panel of 20 or 30 patients in a day, those minutes can compound into hours. In more complex care settings (oncology, for instance), pre-charting a single patient can take up to 30 minutes! Patients may have long and complex histories, extensive labs, imaging across multiple time points, and notes from multiple specialists. Getting up to speed on where a patient stands before a visit requires synthesizing an enormous amount of information scattered across a chart.
And just like documentation at the end of the day, pre-charting often spills outside of clinical hours. Physicians are doing it at home the night before and reviewing charts in the early morning before their first patient. The same “pajama time” problem that ambient scribing addresses on the documentation side exists on the pre-charting side too, it’s just less visible, and less discussed.