There's just no time to work this way, in the US at least.

They’re trying to keep up with notes because notes are how they get paid and how they defend themselves against lawsuits.

My wife doesn’t do notes in front of patients, but as a consequence she spends several hours at home after her shift finishing up notes from memory. She does it because she works in the ER and it allows her to handle more patients (she hates it when patients have to wait 3+ hours so she does everything she can to get them seen quickly). It is definitely much more work for her to do it that way though.

Has your wife considered dictation software? Things like Dragon can be integrated into some EHRs. She could record what she's saying as she works with the patient and even talks directly to them, then clean it up after the fact.

She uses dragon for notes, but she said it’s too much of a mess if you just let it record everything while talking to the patient.

Even if it did work, the notes for future doctors and insurance companies have very little overlap with what you’d say to a patient.

Related to the other reply: this honestly seems like a kinda huge ML opportunity. Imagine if your wife and doctors everywhere were able to just talk to patients with microphones recording it and not worry about notes because the system automatically transcribes it and feeds the result into an LLM that automatically writes up the relevant information, so the end of the day bookkeeping is reduced to just checking its work and manually making changes where necessary. Hard to guess without actually being a doctor but that would surely eliminate a tremendous amount of mindless boilerplate busywork for the majority of patients, right?

There’s a few problems with that. There is very little overlap with what goes into notes written for other doctors and insurance companies and what a doctor says to a patient.

And physical exams have a ton of manual components where a doctor is just palpating things and asking if that hurts or this hurts or feeling if a lump is freely moving, or whether someone can rotate something at a specific angle etc…

Without the doctor annotating exactly what they are doing and what the patients response was every step of the way, the LLM would be missing too much data to really be useful.