The rise of telehealth has made access to care as easy as it’s ever been for patients – However, it has also resulted in an unexpected administrative burden. Providers have to balance video calls, rapport building, and real-time updates to patient’s EHRs on a system that was never meant to be used for clinical-related tasks. It’s a constant juggling act that drains time, focus, and energy.
This is the reason AI medical scribes have become vital in telehealth. Clinicians are no longer stressed out trying to catch up on notes during back to back video consultations. Instead, they are able to focus more on their patients since the AI systems are able to capture patient interactions and build the notes for them. With this system in place, burnout is reduced and telehealth care does what it’s intended to do.
Remote Medical Scribe Services: Features That Actually Matter
The standout services that remote scribe services offer during telehealth consultations are difference makers in the industry.
Platform Compatibility
Your system should run smoothly on IOS, Mac, Windows and Android systems. It should also be able to tolerate slow internet speeds. You shouldn’t have to be on a fiber optic internet for the system to work.
When you work on a different device, it should be consistent and you should be able to pick right back up. In the real world it will be easy to see if the solution works as intended, or if it only looked good in a demonstration.
Accuracy and Customization for Your Specialty
Your telehealth encounters should be 90% accurate, at the very least. Custom specialty templates for telepsychiatry, tele-dermatology, and chronic care management save you tons of customization. When you work with a variety of patients, accent recognition becomes even more important.
Medical terminology databases need regular updates to match emerging virtual care practices. AI medical scribe companies ensure these features are consistently implemented across platforms.
These features ensure accuracy and compliance with digital workflows, offering effortless completion charts, follow-ups, and without additional work. For telehealth teams, these tools mean more streamlined visits, an improved appointment experience, and more care for patients.
The Big Documentation Problems Crushing Telehealth Providers Right Now
Documentation in telehealth has been great. Although the challenges of virtual care delivery can be great, these three vast challenges show why it should be so.
Juggling Multiple Platforms Is a Total Mess
Patients can be seen and heard everywhere. When you have to move your eyes from your video interface to your EHR to the video interface, and back and forth, it loses the rhythm of the conversation with the patients. The quality of the audio can be terrible if your patient has bad internet . Did you know that a telehealth provider spends 50+% of their work-time doing administrative tasks? This stats only gets worse when the telehealth provider can’t perform in-person exams.
You also lose the ability to capture body language. Virtual visits are more time-consuming than in-person visits because you have to chart everything that gets said.
Regulatory Headaches That Didn’t Exist Before
Interstate licensing creates documentation challenges that were not present in pre-telehealth. HIPAA is more difficult when patients video call from their kitchen, and family members are in the room. Virtual prescribing is sensitive, and high-risk medications are even more complex. Regulatory bodies require more detailed audit trails than the strictest providers.
The stress of reimbursement is compounded because telehealth visits often require more detailed documentation to justify reimbursement. Complying with the telehealth documentation rules adds more stress because the rules are inconsistent.
Burnout Is Real and Virtual Care Makes It Worse
For patients, being able to get same-day virtual appointments is convenient and time-saving. Virtual appointments, for every clinician, create huge amounts of documentation. Managing technology and having to communicate with patients through a screen, draft notes in your head, and summarize the notes are mentally very difficult.
Consider this: burnout research indicates that 44% of physicians show at least 1 symptom of burnout. Asynchronous telehealth models continue to worsen this. More patient messages come in, and each one must be thoroughly documented. There’s no structure like with scheduled slots. Volume just keeps increasing. Support systems? Not at all.
How AI Medical Scribes Actually Fix Virtual Care Workflows
Modern musculoskeletal virtual care pain point innovators are focused on the medical scribe industry. The virtual care medical scribe industry is focused on the design of clinical documentation systems for remote care encounters.
Real-Time Audio Capture That Actually Works
Telehealth AI scribe tools capture audio directly from the video platform used for the telehealth call, so the call is not disrupted. They can differentiate your voice from that of your patient and the dog that is barking in the background. While you are still speaking, notes are being created and the processing is done almost immediately.
Integration is seamless with Zoom, Teams, and even proprietary telehealth platforms. No additional recording setups are needed. The noise filtering is actually remarkable. It can handle barking dogs, kids running through, and all the chaos at home that would ruin traditional documentation.
Smart Data Extraction Built for Telehealth
The systems automatically record telehealth-specific details: the patient’s location, whether the consent was confirmed, and what platform you’re using. They record visual assessments when patients show you a rash on the camera, or if they demonstrate a limited range of motion.
Data from wearables and patient-reported metrics flows directly to the notes. Chief complaints are pre-sorted, courtesy of algorithms that recognize patterns from virtual visits, which tend to differ from in-person visits. When your documentation seamlessly integrates with telehealth, the virtual care workflow becomes significantly more efficient.
EHR Connections That Don’t Make You Want to Scream
API capabilities accommodate proprietary systems lacking standard integrations. Single sign-on keeps everything secure whether you’re at home, in the office, or your favorite cafe. During the visit, patient history automatically loads, and notes are sent back to the chart when you’re done—all without requiring additional steps.
Being able to use a variety of devices—whether laptops, tablets, or phones—is crucial, especially in today’s working environment.
Rolling Out AI Scribes in Your Virtual Practice
The selection of a vendor for AI Scribes is only the first step in the implementation process. Establish a telehealth documentation process for each of your health care levels, evaluating each of the processes for vendor-specific issues. Establish baseline metrics such as documentation time for each encounter, how often claims are denied, provider satisfaction, etc.
Examine your documentation process. Audit your telehealth vendor documentation process. Is it secure? Does it integrate seamlessly with telehealth software? Does it have the requisite bandwidth? Is the documentation process secure? Get approvals from the above stakeholders before you choose a telehealth vendor. If you skip this step, you are almost guaranteed to face adoption issues when the time comes.
Design a Pilot That Reveals Truth
Develop a pilot with a diverse group of telehealth providers, defining your success telehealth documentation vendor integration metrics. Specifically telehealth metrics may include, documentation turnaround time, encounter (probably encounters) accuracy, and most importantly, provider and patient satisfaction. A true telehealth pilot will have a minimum of 30 days for an encounter with 100 telehealth encounters to obtain worthwhile documentation metrics.
Set up an opportunity for participants to give feedback and make changes. Feedback from participants in the documentation process will greatly improve your telehealth documentation process. Standard documentation processes are often in place for a reason, and those processes may not be ideal for your telehealth encounters. Use feedback as your guide to redefine adult vendor documentation processes.
Training That Sticks
Distributed provider teams need onboarding resources that are always available rather than one-off training sessions. Teach the following speaking patterns that improve AI accuracy – clear enunciation, pauses between topics, and articulated transitions. Audio issues, platform conflicts, and patient consent script issues need to be solved before they escalate.
Troubleshooting documentation Champions should support peers and answer questions in real time. In the first three months, track and monitor KPIs weekly: note completion time, edit rate, and provider adoption percentage.
Final Thoughts on AI Scribes for Virtual Care
As virtual care volumes increase, the documentation challenges of telehealth are not going anywhere and are only going to become more prevalent. The challenges of platform complexity, regulatory burden, and provider burnout are all addressed by AI medical scribe technology.
The correct implementation strategy diverts these tools from costly experiments to indispensable components in any workflow. Begin with a laser-focused pilot, expand based on actual results, and analyze data to determine expansion rather than making assumptions. Your physicians deserve the support systems that are commensurate with the speed and complexity of virtual care delivery.
Your Burning Questions About Telehealth AI Scribes
What’s the distinction between AI scribes and virtual medical assistants in telehealth?
AI scribes only engage in documentation using ambient listening and EHR system integration, whereas virtual medical assistants also incorporate appointment scheduling, patient intake, triage, and administrative functions. In telehealth workflows, they are complementary, yet serve different purposes.
Does using AI scribes in virtual visits require patient consent?
Yes, consent is on a state-by-state basis, as are the recording laws. Best practice is at the start of the visit, secure verbal or written consent, note that consent was obtained in your documentation, and include signs in the virtual waiting room that inform patients about AI used in the documentation.
Can AI scribes work with asynchronous telehealth, such as messaging in patient portals?
The technology available today does not support asynchronous care as well as it does support live visits. Some systems can document messages in a patient portal and e-consult, but the accuracy and organization of the documentation leave something to be desired. This technology is in an early stage of development