One of the primary challenges of these early digital health days has been how best to use technology to help doctors with their critical note taking responsibilities.

But a new collaboration is aiming to take a significant step toward finally meeting that challenge.

Unified, a large technology and services provider for OB/GYN practices, and Suki, an artificial intelligence-powered medical assistant for clinicians, are teaming up to roll out a note-taking platform that uses voice commands and speech recognition.

According to reports, as a doctor uses the service more, the AI will understand the clinician’s style, vocabulary and habits and will be able to document care more precisely while taking up less human time. The goal of the service is to generate higher quality clinical data resulting in a medical action plan all through voice recognition and AI-interpreted commands.

“Women’s healthcare is incredibly personal, and Suki helps providers to concentrate on providing exceptional care by lowering the barrier created by EHRs,” contended Dr. Matt Eakins, chief operating officer at Unified. “Suki not only helps our providers more accurately document the care they deliver, but enhances clinician experience and helps us address provider burnout.”

Unified notes that for every hour spent with a patient, a clinician spends two hours documenting the interaction and developing a care plan. Since the rollout of EHRs, physicians have pushed back against the amount of time they must spend in front of a keyboard, arguing that they are not data entry workers and the new requirements of documentation take away from their time with the patient. Speech recognition-based EHR optimization has been shown in a variety of clinical settings to help reduce the amount of data entry required as well as improve physician performance.

“Partnering with a company like Unified and its rapidly growing national network of women’s health care providers allows us to continue giving doctors more control of the time in their day – at scale,” said Dr. Nathan Gunn, Suki’s chief operating officer.

Indeed, EHR-induced burnout causes physician performance failure and unauthorized workarounds, among other problems, but healthcare stakeholders are hopeful that speech recognition could be a solution that can shave tremendous amounts of time off of a doctor’s day while at the same time allowing them to produce the high-quality clinical documentation that improves care and simplifies billing.