ScribeAI Promises to Lighten Doctors’ Workload and Improve Patient Care

Artificial intelligence has for years been touted as healthcare’s future. Most of that attention has focused on its potential to recognize disease or tailor therapy, but a most immediate and radical revolution may be brewing elsewhere—in the quotidian but essential area of paperwork.

Doctors regularly remark that their least enjoyable part of their day is when typing out notes keeps them from seeing patients. Researchers find that they spend nearly double the amount of time completing paperwork and documenting electronic medical records than having face-to-face conversations with those in their charge. The cost is steep: burnout is accelerating, consultations are rushed, and patient satisfaction can end with them leaving their doctor’s office with their voices being ignored.

Enter ScribeAI, a new system that aims to change that equation. The platform, developed by entrepreneur Kyle Robertson and co-founder Matt Holmes, uses natural language processing to capture doctor–patient conversations and transform them into structured notes. The software generates SOAP notes, billing codes, patient summaries, and even custom templates tailored to the needs of different clinics. In short, it automates the part of medicine that many doctors dread.

Its benefits, say clinicians who have employed it, are immediate. Lost hours that once went to documentation are reclaimed, leaving physicians to devote more of their time to their patients. Its early adoption is astounding, too: insiders think that ScribeAI has already secured an eight-figure pipeline. For Kyle Robertson, however, it has little to do with business metrics; instead, it is all about giving time back to doctors and reclaiming the human touch at the heart of medicine. Kyle Robertson is accustomed to innovating in healthcare. He started Cerebral, the mental health firm that made psychiatric services, therapy, and medication management available online. Cerebral, at its height, treated hundreds of thousands of Americans for mental illness, many of whom had found it hard to get regular mental health care. It received massive venture investment and contributed to a wider focus on how technology might alleviate the country’s mental health challenges.

He later started Zealthy, a telemedicine service for personal wellness and health. Zealthy was developed to enhance access to regular medical attention with more convenient options for everyday care for the patient. Both of these firms, in their own right, mirrored Robertson’s focus on taking advantage of digital technologies to close access gaps.

Through his healthcare incubator, Revolution Venture Studios, Robertson has turned his attention to the healthcare system’s less flashy, but more low-key problems of documentation, workflow, and time management. It is these that technology can do most to help, he believes—not by replacing doctors, but helping them.

Critics of previous healthcare technology will mention electronic health records as a lesson learned. Cited as all that was wrong with note-taking, they had a tendency to place new burdens on staff. With AI-enabled products such as ScribeAI, however, can these technologies at last do it right?

The physicians already working with ScribeAI propose that the answer might be affirmative. For them, it matters concretely: more time to listen, more time to explain, and more time to win over trust from patients. And in a strained healthcare system that never relaxes its pressure, that would be among the most crucial advances of all.