Introducing AI documentation: the 14-day plan for a small practice

Why a plan is needed at all

A practice installs a program in the morning and lets it run alongside the first consultation that afternoon. By evening there is an impression, but no comparison: which draft belonged to which conversation, and what came from the workflow rather than the tool, can no longer be told apart.

A plan separates exactly that. It settles in advance who decides before the first recording, which consultations are candidates at all, what the information given to patients looks like, who reads the draft, and what gets noted at the end of each day. Fourteen days is long enough to add up to more than one impression, and short enough for a small practice to take on without a large effort.

Four patterns keep showing up in a trial that has no plan:

• The first recording covers a short, unremarkable consultation that shows little.
• Only one person knows how the draft is supposed to be checked.
• Consent is obtained verbally instead of being prepared in writing.
• By the end of the first week there is an impression, but no notes it rests on.

Days 1 to 3: preparation before the first recording

Before any conversation is recorded, the practice settles five points in writing, not in passing during a conversation. This takes more time in the first days than operating the program itself, and that is exactly the point of these days.

The consent step belongs entirely within these three days — as a prepared sentence for the conversation and as a line that goes into the record — not improvised inside the first consultation.

• Who decides: one person runs the trial, makes the decision at the end, and is reachable for questions from the team.
• Which consultations are candidates: a list of appointment types, not "every appointment from now on".
• The written patient information and the consent step: a sentence that explains that a recording is being made, what it is for, and that declining carries no disadvantage.
• Who reads the draft: the physician themselves, before anything is carried into the record.
• Where the draft ends up: the free-text field in the practice's own software, where the reviewed text is pasted in.

Days 4 to 8: the first real consultations

The first recording should not be the short check-up squeezed between two long consultations, but the long, conversation-heavy appointment where it becomes clear whether a draft genuinely helps with the follow-up work, or only looks good on short conversations.

In these days, one physician tests first, not the whole practice at once. A template is fixed and stays the same for the whole period, so that any later differences come from the template and not from the day or the person.

• A long, conversation-heavy consultation first, not the short check-up.
• One physician begins, not the whole practice at once.
• One template stays unchanged for the whole period.
• Every recording is reviewed by the same pattern before it is carried into the practice software.

Days 9 to 12: adjusting the template and the workflow

Only once the template has run through several consultations does it become clear which sections are missing, which are unnecessary, and which wording keeps having to be changed. These days are for exactly that adjustment, not for building a new template from the ground up.

More important than the adjustment itself is what gets noted every evening. Without notes, all that is left at the end is a feeling about whether the trial was worthwhile, and a feeling cannot be checked on the last two days.

• How reviewing the draft felt compared with the previous way of working, in the physician's own words, not as a figure that later looks like a measurement.
• Which wording in the template did not fit and was changed.
• Whether a patient declined the recording, and how the conversation was documented anyway.
• Whether the draft was reviewed the same day, or was left sitting.

Days 13 and 14: the decision

At the end there is no gut decision, only an answer to four questions, resting on the notes from the preceding days.

If price is part of the decision, a comparison of the published list prices belongs in it; the guide to cost and pricing models names the source and the date it was read for every row. KiPT Voice itself can be tried free for 14 days without a credit card, so the trial runs without a financial commitment.

• Does the draft genuinely take something off the evening's follow-up work, or does it just move it later?
• Does the team accept the consent step in everyday work, or is it worked around as an obstacle?
• Does the reviewed text land in the right field of the practice software without extra work on formatting?
• What did the vendor answer about the path the data takes — in writing, not verbally?

What fourteen days cannot decide

Some questions a fourteen-day trial does not answer, however carefully it is run, and a practice should not ask that of it.

• Whether the team's motivation holds once the novelty wears off.
• How the workflow behaves once a locum or a new team member joins.
• Whether the template also suits consultations that were deliberately left out of the trial.
• How well the workflow holds up in a rare case, such as a very short or a very difficult conversation.

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