How do I write my clinical notes faster?

Clinical notes at the kitchen table after the kids are down. Unpaid, and a day behind, always. Most of that evening is not the thinking, which is yours and takes as long as it takes. It is the typing from a blank screen, hours after the patient left, trying to remember which visit was which.

Two changes take most of it back. The first is a template for each kind of visit you do: the headings you always fill, in the order you always fill them, built once in the notes template screen your practice software already has. The second is when the note gets written. Said out loud into that template at the end of the appointment, with the microphone on your phone's keyboard and the record open, the note is far quicker than the evening version, because the visit is still fresh in your mind.

You do not need to be technical for any of this. If you can send a text message, you can talk into a template. An AI chatbot can help draft the empty templates once, from your visit types, without ever seeing a patient, and the notes themselves stay in your practice software.

AI scribes that record the whole consultation are a different decision. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency is clear that the practitioner stays responsible for checking the accuracy of any record an AI scribe creates, and that a scribe generally needs the patient's informed consent. If you go that way, read the product's terms and the guidance before the first patient, not after.

The letter to the GP is the other evening job. When the note is written to a good template, the letter is mostly that note pasted across and tidied, rather than a fresh piece of writing at the end of the day.

A Three Fixes report looks at where your notes and letters pile up and writes the steps and the words to build your templates in the software you already use, so the notes are done when the day is.