Comparisons & Alternatives · Best Practices
Do clinicians spend more time editing an AI scribe note than writing it?
Enzo Health Team4 min readWhether clinicians spend more time editing an AI scribe note than writing it shows up in the published studies below, and in a trial you can time on your own home visits.
Direct answer
No, for most clinicians studied: total note time fell with a scribe. The exceptions are real. One scribe in a randomized trial saved no significant time, and one health system saw no gain for its clinicians as a group. None of these studies covered home visits or the OASIS, so the answer for your agency comes from timing your own clinicians' notes during a trial.
What do the studies measure?
These are published studies that put a clock on clinicians' notes with an ambient AI scribe, the kind that listens to the visit and drafts the note. All of them are clinic or hospital outpatient care. Enzo Scribe was not part of any of these studies.
| Study | Setting | What it measured | What it found |
|---|---|---|---|
| UCLA Health randomized trial, NEJM AI, November 2025 | 238 physicians in 14 specialties at one academic medical center over two months; DAX used in 33.5% of visits, Nabla in 29.5% | Time writing each note with two scribes, against usual care | With Nabla, note time fell from 4 minutes 30 seconds to 3 minutes 49 seconds; usual care fell 18 seconds; DAX showed no significant difference from usual care |
| Penn Medicine, JAMA Network Open, February 2025 | 46 outpatient clinicians in 17 specialties at one academic health system, before and after | Time in notes per appointment; after-hours work | Note time fell from 10.3 to 8.2 minutes; after-hours work fell from 50.6 to 35.4 minutes a workday |
| Five academic health systems, JAMA, April 2026 | 8,581 outpatient clinicians, 1,809 of them scribe users | Documentation time; EHR time outside work hours | 16 fewer minutes of documentation per 8 scheduled patient hours; no significant change outside work hours |
| Atrium Health, NEJM AI, November 2024 | 112 primary care clinicians using DAX Copilot against 103 without it, over 180 days | EHR use and financial measures | No significant difference for the group; in an exploratory analysis, small drops in documentation hours for the heaviest users |
| Kaiser Permanente (The Permanente Medical Group), NEJM Catalyst, 2025 | 7,260 physicians across 2,576,627 visits, October 2023 to December 2024 | Documentation time; EHR time outside 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. | Kaiser reports nearly 16,000 hours of documentation time saved and less EHR time outside the workday |
What can the studies miss?
In their preprint, the UCLA authors note that their EHR measures don't count time spent in other programs, so the savings may be overstated. If a draft is edited somewhere else and then moved into the chart, a study that only reads EHR time won't see those minutes. Count them in your own trial.
What makes editing heavy or light?
A preprint from UC Irvine Health, not yet peer reviewed, looked at 20,198 AI-drafted notes from 225 outpatient clinicians. It found 84.4% of drafts were edited before signing.
The part of the note. The assessment and plan, where the clinician's judgment goes, was the section clinicians changed most. Test results were the section they left alone most. None of these studies covered the OASIS.
The clinician. Among the 215 clinicians whose editing the authors measured in depth, each clinician's own habits explained far more of the difference than specialty did. Some sign drafts with light changes; others rewrite.
What the draft gets wrong. In the UCLA trial, physicians reported that drafts occasionally held clinically significant errors, most often something left out or a wrong pronoun.
How can your agency time editing in a trial?
Our guide to choosing an AI scribe for home health says what to test. Three steps put a clock on it.
Take a baseline first. For a week before the trial, have the same clinicians log how long each note takes the way they chart today, from the end of the visit to the signed note.
Time the whole job. With the scribe, start the clock when the visit ends and stop it when the note is signed in your EHR, including any copying into the chart or fixing fields that didn't carry over.
Read it per clinician. Include the clinicians who doubt the tool, not just the volunteers. An average can hide a nurse who saves time and a therapist who loses it.
If the scribe's total doesn't beat the baseline for most of your clinicians, it isn't the right scribe for your visits.
How does Enzo Scribe handle the edit?
Enzo Scribe generates start of care and visit notes structured for OASIS, so clinicians aren't reformatting a clinic-style draft. Notes are checked against OASIS requirements as they're written, with gaps flagged ahead of review. Clinicians review, edit and sign off before anything submits, and every note keeps a full trail.
Enzo Scribe also runs inside Enzo's full system, so an agency that moves to Enzo gets it with its charts. On another EHR? Enzo Scribe runs alongside the one you have today. Ask us whether it connects to yours.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. In the five-system JAMA study, the largest gains went to clinicians who used a scribe in at least half their visits. In a trial, ask clinicians to use it on every visit they can.
Sources
NEJM AI, longitudinal study of DAX Copilot in primary care at Atrium Health, November 22, 2024
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Time the edits on your own visits.
Watch Enzo Scribe draft a visit note, then see how long your clinician takes to review and sign it.