Free. No sign-up needed
Documentation burden and AI scribe ROI calculator
How many hours your doctors lose to notes, and what that is worth.
For every hour a doctor spends with patients, they spend one and a half to two hours writing it up. More than one in five still spend over eight hours a week on notes outside working hours. None of it shows up in your accounts, because nobody bills for it. It comes out of evenings instead. This puts a number on it, then checks honestly whether an AI note-taker would pay for itself.
Your documentation load
Physicians, NPs, and PAs who write their own notes.
Include after-hours charting. The average is 1.5 to 2 hours per clinic day.
Use collections per clinical hour, or loaded compensation. Whichever question you are trying to answer.
What charting is costing you
Per provider, per week
8 hrs
on documentation alone
Across the group, per year
2,208 hrs
about 1 full-time equivalents
Annual cost
$331,200
of clinician time, valued at your rate
Is a scribe worth it?
Be conservative. Well-implemented ambient scribes land around 40 to 60%, not 90%.
Include implementation and training amortised over year one.
Hours back per provider / week
4 hrs
Value recovered / year
$165,600
Tool cost / year
$18,000
Net annual gain
$147,600
9.2x return
Break-even: at $150 an hour, the tool pays for itself if it saves each provider just 0.4 hrs per week. Everything above that line is gain.
So what do you do with that?
Your group is spending about 2,208 clinician hours a year on documentation. Roughly $331,200 of the most expensive time in the building. The honest answer is that a scribe is not always the right first move. Sometimes the bigger win is note templates, order-set cleanup, or getting the inbox out of the physician's hands. Send me these numbers and I'll tell you which one applies to you before you sign anything.
The email button just opens your normal mail app with the numbers already typed in. Nothing you entered here goes anywhere until you press send. The math ran on your own computer.
Check these before you buy anything
- Where is the time really going? Notes, messages, orders and insurance approvals all feel like “paperwork” to a doctor, but each one needs a different fix. Track them separately for one week before you decide.
- Will they sign the contract? If a tool handles patient information and the company will not sign a business associate agreement, stop there. It does not matter how good the numbers look.
- Who checks and signs it? A doctor has to read and sign every note before it goes in the record. Build that into how the tool works, not into a policy document nobody opens.
- What will you do with the hours? If you plan to see more patients, the number above is on the low side. If you plan to let doctors go home on time, the payoff is people not quitting. That is real, but it will not show up in your takings.
Want to try it this week for nothing? Download the free note-writing helper and try it on a few visits with the names taken out, before you spend anything.