How AI Is Helping Doctors Streamline the Notetaking Process

Sunjya Schweig, MD, used to spend his visits with patients trying to listen while he typed. Now, the San Francisco Bay Area–based functional-medicine doctor is free to focus fully on the person in front of him, thanks to an AI “scribe” that takes notes for him.

More health systems and clinics are turning to ambient AI scribes to document the content of patient visits, liberating doctors and patients to talk more freely and connect more fully. Multiple HIPAA-compliant scribe systems are now in use across the country. They listen in on patient visits and automatically generate detailed clinical notes, summarizing symptoms, concerns, and treatment plans in real time.

“I use it all day long,” Schweig says of his AI scribe. “It writes my notes for me, and I can then customize them, whether for a referral letter to a specialist or to summarize a particular part of the conversation, like their hormone history.”

Functional neurologist Jeremy Schmoe, DC, DACNB, also appreciates the support of an AI scribe. “It allows me to be able to just work with people and not spend as much time on paperwork,” he says. “I can focus on actually getting them better.”

Schmoe used to hesitate when patients asked him to share his notes from their visit: They were often dense, technical, and scattered, and he worried that his patients, many of whom struggle with brain injuries, wouldn’t be able to make sense of them or translate them for their loved ones.

“Now I have a way of saying,
‘Write these notes in a way a patient will understand.’
It’s been a game-changer.”

“Now I have a way of saying, ‘Write these notes in a way a patient will understand.’ It’s been a game-changer,” he says. “Now I can confidently say, ‘I’d love to give you my notes: How detailed do you want them?’” This is the AI factor.

Schweig’s hope is that AI can serve as a physician’s copilot in this way. “A doctor can go about their business with this … system that’s listening to and transcribing your visits, [that’s] deeply ­embedded in a patient’s chart, and [that] can look for patterns and put everything together to say, ‘You might want to think about this diagnosis or that set of tests or interventions.’”

Although AI scribes are a ­supportive tool for healthcare professionals, the technology does have drawbacks. “I think that any time you are providing an app ­access to your health data, you are introducing risk,” says Drew Trabing, engineering manager for technology at Life Time.

One study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2025 observed “frequent errors” in the generated notes, with errors of omission being the most common.

And while the data is typi­cally protected by layers of encryption, data breaches are always possible.