AI Scribe Best Practices

The "Win-Win" Approach

Obtaining consent might feel awkward the first few times, but most patients react positively. They often "light up" when they realize you will be looking at them instead of typing.

Best Practices

• Keep it simple - You don't need a complex legal script.
• Focus on the benefit - Frame it as a way to improve their visit by freeing you from the computer.
• Practice makes perfect - Give yourself more than one shot; it becomes natural quickly.

Possible Scripts

Large Language Models (LLMs) have a natural "recency bias"—they pay more attention to the beginning and the end of a transcript. You can leverage this to get a much more organized note. Many tools recommend starting with introducing who is in the room and the chief complaint for the same reason.

How to do it

• Recap for the family - "Okay, just to recap: We talked about the pneumonia, we're starting antibiotics, and we'll follow up in 2 days."
• Recap for the scribe - If the room was chaotic (e.g., screaming toddler), step out and quickly dictate a 20-second summary almost like if you were signing out the patient.
• Why it works - This clear, authoritative summary at the very end overrides confusing parts of the conversation, often fixing "misheard" details automatically and you'll find the scribe is able to do a much better job.
• Practice makes perfect - Most of the time this isn't necessary, but with more reps you'll come to see situations (like a crying toddler) in advance where a quick recap will help. With practice you'll find your groove.

When trying out these new tools, you don't have to try to change everything at once. Every other part of your job you have practiced thousands of times; give this some practice and time as you find what works for you. Don't judge it by your first few attempts, and recognize what you want may be different than your colleagues. Part of the beauty of this new set up is it is infinitely customizable to your exact preferences if you're willing to take the time. It won't happen overnight but small iterative changes can get you there.

The Staged Approach

• Stage 1 (Getting Started): Continue entering orders and physical exam findings by hand as you always have done. This builds confidence and keeps the workflow manageable. Use your scribe tool's default templates and settings for now. Assess what you like and what you don't.
• Stage 2 (Advanced): Once comfortable, start verbalizing your exam findings ("Pertinent positives/negatives") while in the room so the scribe picks them up. Practice recognizing when a short recap at the end would be helpful. Adjust your scribe's default settings to be more to your liking. Continue to observe what is working and what could be improved
• Stage 3 (Optimized): Use custom LLM Editor prompts to automatically transform the note to match your exact voice for quick and confident review. Start by creating a few examples of what ideal notes would look like. These are your few shot examples. Then create an editor prompt that takes your scribe tool's default outputs and transforms them into exactly what you want to see by trying to copy the pattern of your examples. You can use the tools on our site to help get started! Build off a prompt from the library, use the remix tool to modify it and make it your own, or use the AI assistant to try to do it from scratch. The state of the art LLM's are also very helpful with their increased compute power. If you haven't tried any of them before I would recommend trying Google's - it is free if you have a gmail account. See prompt engineering best practices page for more.