| September 17, 2025
| 6:00 AM
Physicians continue to experience unprecedented levels of burnout, with many reporting that excessive documentation demands significantly contribute to this concerning issue.1,2,3 Arslan Mahmood, MD, a family medicine consultant at Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare (JHAH), a state-of-the-art health service created for Saudi Aramco employees and their families, said that has been the case at his institution. “Documentation needs definitely played a part in burnout in doctors here,” he said.
While JHAH had previously implemented a dictation system to help relieve those burdens, it was not working as well as leaders hoped. As a result, Fahad Al-Harthi, Project Manager at JHAH, said that the service decided to invest in a new solution to offer their clinicians more features — at a lower cost. After careful consideration, the organization implemented Solventum™ Fluency Direct™, a cloud-based speech recognition solution that enables physicians of any medical specialty to create, review, edit and sign clinical notes directly in the electronic medical record (EMR) using their voices.
“Our goal was to reduce the amount of time doctors were spending on clinical documentation, as well as to reduce the number of errors and problems they had with our existing dictation solution,” said Al-Harthi.
Encouraging adoption through time savings
It was important for technology stakeholders at JHAH to show the organization’s physicians just how much time they can save using the new solution. The goal, said Nadine Halabi, Regional Adoption Team Manager with Solventum, was to see measurable improvements in the average time it takes for physicians to document notes per appointment, complete a single note and document all notes over the course of a day. “These tasks were an important way to demonstrate the solution’s effectiveness in reducing the manual effort involved with patient notes,” she said.
After analyzing documentation data for 320 JHAH physicians, comparing the amount of time spent on notes the previous year compared to that collected after the Fluency Direct implementation, JHAH learned that 140 of those doctors saw significant time savings across all three metrics. The most proficient Fluency Direct users saw a 32%-40% reduction in documentation time. But even those who were less familiar with the application saw time savings in the 17%-18% range.
The path to increased acceptance
In addition to the time savings gained since the implementation, Mahmood said he appreciates that Fluency Direct produces accurate notes and is “straightforward” and easy to use. “It’s fabulous how much time it can save as it makes our documentation much more efficient. And we also have more time to focus on the patient and their story, instead of trying to type it all into the EMR,” he said. “Now I cannot manage without it. If Fluency Direct was not working one day, it would be a disaster day for me.”
Al-Harthi said that JHAH was excited to see such positive results from the time-savings study — and those results have helped JHAH inspire greater adoption across the service. “The feedback we are getting from physicians is overwhelmingly positive,” he noted. According to Al-Harthi, JHAH is poised to build on these successes by adopting ambient technology.
Learn more about the JHAH time savings study here.
References
- World Health Organization. April 25, 2024. Protecting health and care workers’ mental health and well-being: Technical consultation meeting. https://www.who.int/news/item/25-04-2024-202404_protecthw_mentalhealth.
- Shanafelt, T.D., West, C.P., Sinsky, C.,et al. April 9, 2025. Changes in burnout and satisfaction with work-life integration in physicians and the general U.S. working population between 2011 and 2023. Mayo Clinic Proceedings. https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(24)00668-2/fulltext.
- American Medical Informatics Association. AMIA survey underscores impact of excessive documentation burden. Press release, June 3, 2024. https://amia.org/news-publications/amia-survey-underscores-impact-excessive-documentation-burden.
